Need to to get exsisting chips value for material design

I am using material css to have chips in html for a blog post. Here is the html rendering for chips.

<div style="padding-top: 10px;" id="post-tags-5fa1e733b4da1534a9096545">
            
            <a href="">
                <div class="chip">1st</div>
            </a>
            
            <a href="">
                <div class="chip">2nd</div>
            </a>
            
            <a href="">
                <div class="chip">3rd</div>
            </a>
     
        </div>

Now I am trying to edit the post and make the tags editable. So I am using jQuery to get the text.

var post_tags = $('#post-tags-'+post_id).text(); 

But I want to preload it in my edit post modal. Is there any easy way to do it ?

$('.chips-initial').material_chip({
    data: [{
      tag: '1st',
    }, {
      tag: '2nd',
    }, {
      tag: '3rd',
    }],
  });