Note to Self 10 – JQuery Selectors and Custom Functions and a thought on JQuery

After using Python, diving into jQuery has proven exceptionally difficult. Even though it solves the not-so-small problem of commonizing the DOM across multiple browsers, I find it very difficult to read. I know with time I’ll get used to it and maybe even find some beauty in my jQuery code, but it will never stop me from wishing for a cleaner syntax like that of Python or Ruby.

With that said, here’s a bit of what I learned about jQuery recently.

• Selectors in jQuery are a syntax for selecting an html element. Selectors can return a single element or several (or none if nothing matching is found).
• $(“#[elementID]”) – finds an element with an id attribute equal to “elementID”.
• $(“[name=’elementName’]”) – gets all elements with a name attribute equal to “elementName”
• $(“[name^=’element’]”) – gets all elements with a name attribute that begins with “element”
• $(“[name$=’Name’]”) – gets all elements with a name attribute that ends with “Name”
• $(“input:checkbox”) – gets all checkboxes
• $(“#blah > input:checkbox”) – gets all checkboxes within a parent element of id “blah”
• Creating a custom function in jQuery:

$.fn.CustomFunctionName({function()({
    //code here
})

$.fn.exclaim = function(message){
        alert(message)
}
$.fn.exclaim("hello, world")