I have this piece of html duplicated in the document.

1. <a class="label application-label"  href="/label/bp/app10411" rel="tag">
       <span>app10411</span>
       <span class="remove" title="Remove"></span>
   </a>

I need to extract the content of the first span inside the link, the "app10411" string. I have tried

1. $(".label.application-label span:first").html() 
2. $(".label.application-label").find("span").html()
3. $(".label.application-label").first().find("span").html()   

in the selector I have used ".label.application-label" , ".label .application-label" and ".application-label"

and other variants with no luck, always getting "null"

What am I missing? Thanks a lot.