So I've been struggling with this for a while now, and since it was damn near impossible to find on the Drupal Answers Stack Exchange, Drupal forums, or on the internet in general, I'm posting it here so that someone else doesn't rip their hair out.

I had a need to be able to do a custom menu in Drupal 7, and so I had to go looking for a way to customize the HTML output for the main menu. Unfortunately, it's REALLY hard to find a solution that works, but I stumbled across one and am posting it here so that when I need to find it again, I can get to it quickly.

Search phrases so that other people can find it as well:

• Add span tags before menu items
• arbitrary HTML in menu
• custom HTML in main menu

I hope that's all I need for the time being

So I've decided to port my blog over to Drupal 7, because Drupal is awesome. WordPress is cool and everything, but I need a place to play around with Drupal a bit more, and this is the most public place I care to do it. I mean, who looks at my blog anyway?