[jQuery] html to text

[bart]

I'm pulling html from each td tag which resides in the tablerow of a
table like so;

$('table tr td').each(function()
{
        $('<div>').text($(this).html()).appendTo('#jaheur');
});

For each match it creates a div which holds the HTML in text format. I
noticed that it transformed a line break <br /> to <br> (without the
slash) what causes this behavior? Does this only happen with self
closing tags? Can I prevent it all together?