Manipulating data from an ajax call before putting results in div

I'm calling a page and my returned results is the data of that page (duh). Here's what it looks like:

$.get('/myPage.html',function(data){

$('#results').html(data);

});

What i need to do is remove an element from that returned data. After I do that, i need to extract just the contents of the . Once that's complete, i want to put the results into a variable. The only way I know of to do this is have a container, #results, and send the data there. Once my data is there, then i could remove/extract. Is there a way for me to do this without first putting it into the #results?

Thanks for your help in advance!