Creating a div element in jQuery

You can use append (to add at last position of parent) or prepend (to add at fist position of parent):

$('#parent').append('<div>hello</div>');    
// or
$('<div>hello</div>').appendTo('#parent');

Alternatively, you can use the .html() or .add() as mentioned in a different answer.

Technically $('<div></div>') will 'create' a div element (or more specifically a DIV DOM element) but won't add it to your HTML document. You will then need to use that in combination with the other answers to actually do anything useful with it (such as using the append() method or such like).

The manipulation documentation gives you all the various options on how to add new elements.

div = $("<div>").html("Loading......");
$("body").prepend(div);    

$("<div/>").appendTo("div#main");

will append a blank div to <div id="main"></div>

All these worked for me,

HTML part:

<div id="targetDIV" style="border: 1px solid Red">
    This text is surrounded by a DIV tag whose id is "targetDIV".
</div>

JavaScript code:

//Way 1: appendTo()
<script type="text/javascript">
    $("<div>hello stackoverflow users</div>").appendTo("#targetDIV"); //appendTo: Append at inside bottom
</script>

//Way 2: prependTo()
<script type="text/javascript">
    $("<div>Hello, Stack Overflow users</div>").prependTo("#targetDIV"); //prependTo: Append at inside top
</script>

//Way 3: html()
<script type="text/javascript">
    $("#targetDIV").html("<div>Hello, Stack Overflow users</div>"); //.html(): Clean HTML inside and append
</script>

//Way 4: append()
<script type="text/javascript">
    $("#targetDIV").append("<div>Hello, Stack Overflow users</div>"); //Same as appendTo
</script>

simply if you want to create any HTML tag you can try this for example

var selectBody = $('body');
var div = $('<div>');
var h1  = $('<h1>');
var p   = $('<p>');

if you want to add any element on the flay you can try this

selectBody.append(div);

<div id="foo"></div>

$('#foo').html('<div></div>');