Can I use jQuery selectors on an HTML string that is not attached to the DOM?

Question

So if I have a variable like

var ht = \"
Paragraph Here
\"

If it was attached to the DOM I could

Answer 1

There is no mystery. Selecting

$('p')  

selects p elements of the document, the implied context.

But the p elements in:

var ht = "
Paragraph Here
";  

are not attached to the document (DOM) so it's OK if they are not selected.

Fortunately the $() function has a second argument, the context, that has to be used here, like:

$('p', $(ht).context)