jQuery won't find custom tags

Question

I have HTML with several custom tags. I want to find all but two ('start', 'end') and unwrap them. jQuery.find() seems to only find these custom tags when I search what's in the document, not when I search a jQuery object. What am I doing wrong?

Should be self-explanatory in the fiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/hpNN3/2/

Here's the javascript part:

var raw = $('pre').html();
var html = $(raw);
var starts = html.find('start');
var spans = html.find('span');

//this returns nothing
console.log(starts)
// works - can find in object
console.log(spans)
//this works
console.log($('start'));


//only picks up spans, not annotations
// I want this to return the innerHTML of the pre, stripping all tags except for 'start' and 'end' -- but retain the contents of those tags.
var cleaned = html.find(':not(start, end)').each(function() {
    $(this).contents().unwrap();
});

console.log(cleaned);

$('#clean').html(cleaned)

and an example of the HTML:

<span class="ng-scope">CTAGCTCTCTGGAGATTAACGAGGAGAAATACTAGAtTGGTTCAT</span>
<start feat="1" class="ng-scope"></start>
<annotation index="1" class="ng-isolate-scope ng-scope" style="background-color: rgb(238, 153, 238); background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">
    <span tooltip="Another Promoter" tooltip-placement="mouse" tooltip-append-to-body="true" ng-transclude="" class="ng-scope">
        <span class="ng-scope">GATCATAAgcttgaat</span>
    </span>
</annotation>
<end feat="1" class="ng-scope"></end>
<span class="ng-scope">tagccaaacttatt</span>

which should be:

CTAGCTCTCTGGAGATTAACGAGGAGAAATACTAGAtTGGTTCAT<start feat="1" class="ng-scope"></start>GATCATAAgcttgaat<end feat="1" class="ng-scope"></end>tagccaaacttatt

Thanks

Answer 1

Your problem lies with the your initial variables:

var raw = $('pre').html();
var html = $(raw);

This translates to var html = $($('pre').html()), which will not match any element. The reason being that, since the selector is not preceded by an # or ., it is looking literally looking for the tag:

<start feat="11" class="ng-scope">
</start>
<annotation index="11" class="ng-isolate-scope ng-scope" style="background-color: rgb(238, 204, 153); background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">
</annotaion>

etc...

Here is a demo of what I mean: http://jsfiddle.net/hpNN3/7/

---

Simply do the following:

var html = $('pre');

DEMO: http://jsfiddle.net/hpNN3/6/