title: jquery prepend <span> without automatically adding the closing tag
body: <p>I am trying to add a <code>&lt;span&gt;</code> tag around the contents of the <code>&lt;a&gt;</code> tag.  </p>
  
  <p>The HTML renders without js like this:
  <code>&lt;a href="#"&gt;Link Here&lt;/a&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>I would like to add the <code>&lt;span&gt;</code> inside the link like this: <code>&lt;a href="#"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Link Here&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>My idea was to 'prepend' the opening span and 'append' the closing tag to the a, however I can't get past the prepend.  When I try to prepend the 'span' it automatically adds the closing <code>&lt;/span&gt;</code> tag.  Here is the script I'm using</p>
  
  <pre><code>$(document).ready(function () {
      $('a.button2').prepend('&lt;span&gt;');
  });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here is what it is rendering:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;a href="#"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;Link Here&lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to prepend ONLY the opening tag so that I can append the closing later, or another solution to this problem?</p>