title: jquery - get text of html return
body: <p>This is probably simple but i can't seem to find my answer...</p>
  
  <p>i have an ajax call that returns html</p>
  
  <pre><code> dataType: "html"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and it's returned 'msg' looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div id="x"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hello&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and that gets dom-added to the top of a parent div:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ajax call...
  request.done(function(msg) {
     $('#parent').prepend(msg);
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The issue is, i DONT want to do this dom manipulation if it's text hasn't changed (as there are other effects that take place that i've truncated out.  (This is a notice display that checks for updates in an interval)</p>
  
  <p>so, what i want to do is find "Hello" within msg and compare it against a current div x's p that may already be on page.  This second part is easy to address, but the first part, I need to do something like msg.text() to just get "Hello", but a few varities i tried failed.</p>
  
  <p>pointers?</p>