Resolved Trying to sort, can't get it to work

[WolfShade]

Hello, everyone.

I am trying to sort something that isn't starting as an array, but I'm trying to make it into an array, sort it, then put it back as a string.

I have a SELECT tag that allows multiple selections, and an "ADD" button that calls a function that will populate an empty div with the TEXT of whatever was selected, separating each selection with "<br />". So, let's say that three options were highlighted and the add button clicked. The div would then look like this (in code, anyway.)

<div id="selectedDevs">Jack Black<br />ZZTop<br />Madonna</div>

This much is working great.

But I'm trying to use jQuery to sort the values.

$('#selectedDevs').html($('#selectedDevs').html().split('<br />').sort().join('<br />'));

It does not change anything. Any suggestions?

Thank you,

[WolfShade]

I fixed it, but I don't know why it's working.

All I did was replace <br /> with <BR> in the split.

$('#selectedDevs').html($('#selectedDevs').html().split('<BR>').sort().join('<br />'));

The split was not seeing <br />, for some reason.

[Dormilich]

HTML does not have a <BR /> element. upon reading in an XHTML document through the HTML parser (which is not done only when the document is served with an XHTML MIME-Type) the elements are converted to valid HTML elements, i.e. <BR> (and that is what is read by the .html() method).

in short, JS accesses the parsed HTML document, not the written source code.