Wow. I leave my computer for 24 hours and I get answers from John Resig,
Yehuda Katz and Mike Alsup. I love the jQuery community (and jQuery itself,
of course).
Mike:
Yes, adding to an empty array then jQuery'ing it would work; it's how I
originally structured my code. Adding to a jQuery better matches the program
logic to what I'm trying to accomplish; my definition of "elegant." I don't
have a problem writing $([]); i just wondered if there was a better way.
Yehuda:
I do know about $('<..html/>'), but my mother always said "Don't hang with
those innerHTML kids, you'll learn bad habits." Seriously, I find it very
hard to debug the assemble-a-string-and-have-the-interpreter-figure-it-out
sort of thing, like innerHTML and eval. I'm not a strict standardista, but
using actual code and HTML lets Firebug or the validator find my stupid
syntax errors much more easily.
John:
I believe you on the $() thing; I'll stick to $([]). It clearly could be
coded differently, either Mike's way or:
var result;
$.each(...
if (result) result.add(e); else result = e;
)
but again, I think my way is more elegant.
The original code is my variant of Kevin's DOM creation code
(http://mg.to/2006/02/27/easy-dom-creation-for-jquery-and-prototype#comment-294)
(yes, yet another DOM creator):
$.dom = function(){
var result = $([]), e;
for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; ++i){
if (arguments[i].constructor == String){
// a string is either a text literal or a tag name of an element.
// distinguish by the following argument; a tag name will be followed
by an Object
if (arguments[i+1] && arguments[i+1].constructor == Object){
e = $(document.createElement(arguments[i])).
attr (arguments[++i]).css(arguments[i].style || {}); //
incorporate the attributes Object
// append children if the next argument is an array
if (arguments[i+1] && arguments[i+1].constructor == Array)
e.append($.dom.apply(null, arguments[++i]));
}else{
e = document.createTextNode(arguments[i]);
}
}else if (arguments[i].constructor == Array){
// process the array
e = $.dom.apply(null, arguments[i]);
}else{
// Something else . Let jQuery deal with it
e = arguments[i];
} // if
result = result.add(e);
} // for
return result;
}; // dom
This version allows you to insert pre-existing things in the created
elements, like
$.dom('div', {Class: 'x'}, [ 'These are all the P elements:' [$('P')]])
puts $('P') into the new div.
It also lets the attribute object include inline styles, as in
$.dom('div', {id: 'myDiv', style: {border: '1px solid red'}})
by using .css(arguments[i].style || {});
Would it be worth changing .attr to allow this directly?
You can see this in action at http://youngisrael-stl.org ; look at the
results from search box on the left column.
i guess you can add that to the list of jQuery sites, too. I'd be flattered.
Thanks for your comments.
Danny
John Resig wrote:
>
> More code depends on $() referring to document than you might think.
> Whenever no context is passed in to a jQuery object, the context is
> set to 'document'. That way when you do a .find(), it'll actually find
> some relevant elements. Since $() has no context, the context then
> defaults to document. Same with doing $("").
>
> If you want an empty set, $([]) is the preferred solution (it's what I
> would use, too).
>
> All that being said, however, I somehow suspect that the result that
> you're trying to achieve could be done much more easily, in another
> way. Can you post your full code for us to look at? I don't think I've
> ever seen a true need to have an empty jQuery set returned.
>
> --John
>
--
View this message in context:
http://www.nabble.com/Creating-an-empty-jQuery-object-tf3240592.html#a9026722
Sent from the JQuery mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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