calling function on jquery selector

Question

Okay, normally I would consider myself an intermediate user of jquery, but this seems like a very noob issue that I'm not quite sure how to code.

I have one div that I want to run a function against. The only way I'm aware of how to do this is something like...

$("#divname").each(function(){   dostuff(); }); 

This seems like a bit more work when I know there will only be one element. I tried this...

$("#divname", function(){    console.log($(this)); }); 

... but it writes out the whole dom. I just want to run the function on this one element. How do I do that?

Answer 1

You should call the function, passing your element in as its object:

function doStuff() {     alert( $(this).html() ); }  doStuff.call( $("#foo")[0] ); 

Due to the way we built and call doStuff, we can still use it as a callback on .each:

$(".bar").each( doStuff ); 

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/jonathansampson/WuyJc/

Answer 2

If you maintain that each element in HTML DOM has unique id that means no two elements have same id, then $('#divname') always return a single element and $('#divname').each() will run one time. not more than one.

Now in your case you want something like

dosomething( $('#divname') ); 

For example:

function doSomething( el ) {    el.append('<span>hello</span>'); }   doSomething( $('#divname') ); 

DEMO