Find body tag in an ajax HTML response
I ended up with this simple solution:
var body = data.substring(data.indexOf("<body>")+6,data.indexOf("</body>"));
$('body').html(body);
Works also with head or any other tag.
(A solution with xml parsing would be nicer but with an invalid XML response you have to do some "string parsing".)
Parsing the returned HTML through a jQuery object (i.e $(data)) in order to get the body tag is doomed to fail, I'm afraid.
The reason is that the returned data is a string (try console.log(typeof(data))). Now, according to the jQuery documentation, when creating a jQuery object from a string containing complex HTML markup, tags such as body are likely to get stripped. This happens since in order to create the object, the HTML markup is actually inserted into the DOM which cannot allow such additional tags.
Relevant quote from the documentation:
If a string is passed as the parameter to $(), jQuery examines the string to see if it looks like HTML.
[...] If the HTML is more complex than a single tag without attributes, as it is in the above example, the actual creation of the elements is handled by the browser's innerHTML mechanism. In most cases, jQuery creates a new element and sets the innerHTML property of the element to the HTML snippet that was passed in. When the parameter has a single tag (with optional closing tag or quick-closing) — $( "< img / >" ) or $( "< img >" ), $( "< a >< /a >" ) or $( "< a >" ) — jQuery creates the element using the native JavaScript createElement() function.
When passing in complex HTML, some browsers may not generate a DOM that exactly replicates the HTML source provided. As mentioned, jQuery uses the browser"s .innerHTML property to parse the passed HTML and insert it into the current document. During this process, some browsers filter out certain elements such as < html >, < title >, or < head > elements. As a result, the elements inserted may not be representative of the original string passed.