I've found this weird behavior when I updated to jquery 1.9.0.

I've generated a string (using a client side template engine, but that doesn't matters) that contains this html:

<li class="photo_fields">
        <ul>
          <li class="col10percent">
            <img src="blob:http%3A//localhost%3A3000/3f21fd50-5c77-42a2-b6b7-b04c14f83711">
          </li>
          <li class="col75percent margin15left padding5left">
            <div class="progress progress-striped active">
              <div class="bar" style="width: 0%;"></div>
            </div>
          </li>
          <li class="col10percent center">
            <a href="/photos" data-method="delete" rel="nofollow">
              <span class="icon icon_fnc icon_delete"></span>
    </a>      </li>
        </ul>
      </li>

I store this string in an variable, let's say, content.

In 1.8.3,

  $(content)

works fine. It returns a jQuery object with the proper DOM structure parsed.

In 1.9 the same code raises this error

Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: <li class="photo_fields"> <ul> <li class="col10percent"> <img src="blob:http%3A//localhost%3A3000/3f21fd50-5c77-42a2-b6b7-b04c14f83711"> </li> <li class="col75percent margin15left padding5left"> <div class="progress progress-striped active"> <div class="bar" style="width: 0%;"></div> </div> </li> <li class="col10percent center"> <a href="/photos" data-method="delete" rel="nofollow"> <span class="icon icon_fnc icon_delete"></span> </a> </li> </ul> </li>

To be sure that the problem was in jQuery and not in the generated code, I stored this string with localStorage, and tried to parse it in 1.8.3 and 1.9.0. Again, 1.8 works and 1.9 raises this error.

I thought that was because of the blob src in the image tag, but that is not the problem either. I removes the entire img tag from the string, and 1.9 still fails to parse this code.

Am I doing something wrong? The html code seems valid to me.