[jQuery] Re: Syntactic sugar for checking whether an element exists

[Christof Donat]

Hi,

>   var element;
>   if ( (element=$('#someID')[0]) ) {
>     /* element exists */
>   } else {
>     /* damn... */
>   }

I'd prefer

var e
if( (e=$('#someID')).length ) {
 // element Exists
} else {
 // element does not exist
}

Usually you whant to know if an Element exists to create it otherwise, so I 
often have code like this:

if( ! (e=$('#someID').length) ) 
        e = $('<p id="someID">asdf</p>').appendto('#myParent');
e.hide();

Christof