jQuery Prepend Open Tag Append Closing Tag

Question

Firstly, I am familiar with .wrapAll() and that is not what I need. I have some markup that I am not able to change and I need to wrap everything in a <li>.

Here is what I am trying to do:

$('nav[role="breadcrumb"] ul a').wrap('<li></li>');

$('nav[role="breadcrumb"] ul li:last').after('<li>');

$('nav[role="breadcrumb"] ul').append('</li>');

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<nav role="breadcrumb">
  <ul class="clearfix">
    <a href="http://eggaday.armystage.com/">Home</a>
    <a href="http://eggaday.armystage.com/health-care-professionals/">Health Care Professionals</a> Healthy Choices Cholesterol Kits
  </ul>
</nav>

The problem is that jQuery closes each of these <li> tags. Here is the original markup:

<nav role="breadcrumb">
  <ul class="clearfix">
    <a href="http://eggaday.armystage.com/">Home</a>
    <a href="http://eggaday.armystage.com/health-care-professionals/">Health Care Professionals</a> Healthy Choices Cholesterol Kits
  </ul>
</nav>

As you can see, I have some loose text at the bottom of this <ul> and I am trying to get it wrapped in an <li>.

Answer 1

.contents() will get all the children, including the text nodes

$('nav[role="breadcrumb"] ul').contents().filter(function() {
   return $.trim($(this).text())!=="";
}).wrap('<li/>');

EDIT: Added the filter method to get rid of the whitespace text nodes