possible to use jQuery on elements outside the document?

Question

Working with some legacy architecture and because of the nature of the initialization sequence I need to wrap an element before it's been added to the document. Say I have the following:

<div id="containerX">
   <div id="myNode"></div>
</div>

And I need to wrap "myNode" before it's added to the DOM. Do jQuery selectors even work in this context? If so, how can I make that happen? I've tried passing in the element like so:

(Corrected some typos here referred to in some answers below):

$(this.element).wrap('<div id="'+ "myWrapper_" + this.id + '"></div>');

with no luck. I'm assuming that the usual syntax for selectors won't work since the nodes are outside the document. The closest thing I've found was this post here: Manipulate DOM elements before adding them to the document but the difference between my situation and his is I don't have strings, I have elements created with document.createElement that have not been appended.

Can anyone point me in the right direction or is this even possible?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use Jquery on other elements as as well, and I've more than once used it to parse a response from an AJAX request.

Though I am not sure if your exact request is possible, I think the main problem in your code is the missing < before the div you're trying to wrap around your element.