I finally found some answers to my questions. For those interested check out the following:
Iterating over jQuery and non-jQuery Objects
https://learn.jquery.com/using-jquery-core/iterating/There is more to this article but specifically:
$( "li" ).map( function(index, element) {
return this.id;
}).get();
Notice the .get() chained at the end. .map() actually returns a jQuery-wrapped collection, even if we return strings out of the callback. We need to use the argument-less version of .get() in order to return a basic JavaScript array that we can work with. To concatenate into a string, we can chain the plain JS .join() array method after .get().