> Now that it is laid out in front of me it's pretty obvious,
> but when you come into the thing cold, these things are not
> obvious. I think it would be a good idea to explicitly state
> what the object is, and that $ refers to it (I think that's
> right ... now I mention it I'm not quite sure if $ is an
> object reference or an operator ... ) - anyhow just a bit of
> clarification of the basics.
It's neither of the above. :-)
$ is not an operator. In JavaScript, the $ character can be used in names in
the same way as a letter.
$ is also not a "jQuery object" or a reference to one. at all. It is a
*function* that returns a jQuery object.
A good way to think of the $ function is that it's just like a constructor
function (e.g. Date or Array), except you don't use the "new" operator with
it, you just call it.
Consider this code:
// Give the $ function a more self-explanatory name
var createQueryObject = $;
// Create a query object for a specified query string
var myQueryObject = createQueryObject('#test');
// Call a method of the query object
myQueryObject.hide();
That is the same as:
$('#test').hide();
Note also that $ and jQuery (used as a name in JavaScript code) are the same
thing. So you could also write this code as:
jQuery('#test').hide();
Or:
var myQueryObject = jQuery('#test');
myQueryObject.hide();
-Mike
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