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Adding elements to wrapper after calling wrap doesn't work
I'm trying to do some DOM manipulation in jQuery, but am having issues with creating wrapper elements. For some reason, prepending to the wrapper doesn't work after I call wrap.
Code
<html>
<body>
<p>Text</p>
</body>
</html>
const wrapper = $('<div class="wrapper"></div>');
const newText = $('<p>New Text</p>');
$('p').wrap(wrapper);
wrapper.prepend(newText);
Expected result
<div class="wrapper">
<p>New Text</p>
<p>Text</p>
</div>
Actual result
<div class="wrapper">
<p>Text</p>
</div>
Does anyone know why this happens? I could just re-select the wrapper div, and that works, but it seems pretty inefficient.
1 answer
Remember that jQuery selectors in general can match more than one element. If you had multiple <p> elements in your page, $('p').wrap(wrapper) would put wrapper divs around each of them. So .wrap uses its argument as a template to clone new wrappers for each match.
Other jQuery DOM manipulation methods do treat the single-match case specially and reuse instead of clone their argument, if given something that's already DOMmish. This special case is described in the API documentation for those methods. The .wrap documentation doesn't have any such caveats in it.
Can't tell you why it's designed that way, but it's behaving as documented. If running the selector twice doesn't sound good to you, you might consider something like:
const wrapper = $('<div class="wrapper"></div>');
const newText = $('<p>New Text</p>');
const p = $('p').replaceWith(wrapper);
wrapper.prepend(newText, p);
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