jquery not working to change inner html?

Question

hey people I\'m new at jquery and i have been trying to figure this out for like the past couple of hours... what the hell am I doing wrong here? All I want to do is change

Answer 1

jQuery always returns a jQuery collection--not a DOM element. In order to access DOM properties directly, you'll need to retrieve an element from the collection:

$(".left_menu_bar").first().innerHTML = "You clicked me!";

This isn't very convenient, however, and helmus's answer describes the way that things are usually done.