jQuery 1.4.2 constructor looses first text nodes

jQuery 1.4.2 constructor looses first text nodes

I ran into this with the  jquery.tmpl plugin.  The symptom can be easily reproduced with:

jQuery('leading text <strong>followed by an element</strong>')

will only have a length of 1 and will represent only the element 'strong'.

This can be traced to about line 125 in jquery 1.4.2 uses match[1] to build the fragment not match[0].

Is this intentional or a bug?  I can't see how using match[0] could cause issues.

Thanks,
Thatcher