I'm making an ajax request to a page on my site with this element as a direct child of the body tag:

```
<div class="container" id="wantme"><div class="content"></div></div>

```

There's only one `.container`, and I want to grab its ID which I don't know.

As far as I can tell, this code should do what I want:

```
$.get('/page', function(data) {
    id = $('.container', data).attr('id');
});

```

But the `.container` selector fails to find anything.

I did find these two workarounds. I can find `.content`, and I can climb up the tree like this:

```
id = $('.content', data).parent().attr('id');

```

But I can't leap directly there.

I found this workaround elsewhere on StackOverflow that works:

```
html = $('<div></div>').html(data);
id = html.find('.container').attr('id');

```

But why is it that the seemingly obvious answer doesn't work?