Get element id from DOM path

Question

I've seen many times how to get the DOM path of an element using JQuery, but never how to go in the opposite direction: how do I get the element from the DOM path?

Suppose I have a DOM path like "html/body/div1/div2/div2/div3/div3/em"; I want to highlight the element described by the path, so I need to create a JQuery selector that points to that element, and then I'll be free to use some functions to highlight it.

How do I do that?

At the moment, I tried to construct a function that will split the path in an array, then cycle over it, processing everytime all the children nodes until I find the node I need; as you may understand, it's quite complicated, especially because I may find EVERY html tag, and I can't make a switch case for every tag... I hope there's something quicker and simpler.

In any case, here's what I've done at the moment:

function reconstructNodes(selectorlist)
{
    var range = $('#panelWithHTML').children();
    var array = selectorlist.split("/");
    for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {

        range = range.children();

        switch (array[i]) {
            case 'html':
                for (var j = 0; j < range.length; j++)
                {
                    if (range[j].tagName === 'BODY') {
                        range = range[j];
                    } 
                }
                break;
            case 'body':
                for (var j = 0; j < range.length; j++)
                {

                }
                break;
        }
    }
}

As you can see, I started with the switch, but it's gonna be an eternal code writing.

Any idea?