manipulating data for column filtering or global searching

Hi,
I initialize datatable from fully populated HTML table. The data in some of the columns are wrapped in HTML tags, such as <td><span class="local">10.1.1.20</span><td>. I am able to create custom sorting functions to extract the actual data 10.1.1.20 from the wrapping tags.

When it comes to column filtering or global searching, is there a similar mechanism to the custom sorting so that the wrapping tags can be stripped off before the filtering or searching function is applied?

Thanks