Passing a string to $

Question

Trying to get a grip on CoffeeScript and jQuery by doing the Code School CoffeeScript course.

One of the excerpts used is $("<li>" + name + "</li>"). I managed to figure out that $ is an alias for jQuery (right?), so I guess this means we're calling the jQuery function with a string (name is a string, surrounded by two literals).

So... what does the jQuery function do on its own? Tried looking at api.jquery.com, having trouble figuring it out. Thank you!

Answer 1

In this instance you are using jQuery to create a DOM element.

An <li> with some (text I'm assuming) that is in the variable name

If a string is passed as the parameter to $(), jQuery examines the string to see if it looks like HTML (i.e., it has somewhere within the string). If not, the string is interpreted as a selector expression, as explained above. But if the string appears to be an HTML snippet, jQuery attempts to create new DOM elements as described by the HTML. Then a jQuery object is created and returned that refers to these elements.

The structure for creating DOM elements with jQuery is:

$( html, props )

Check out these jQuery Docs to read more about the jQuery selector.

html: A string defining a single, standalone, HTML element (e.g. or ).

props: A map of attributes, events, and methods to call on the newly-created element.

As we can see in your example we only pass html. $("<li>" + name + "</li>")

Answer 2

You are actully passing a string to the jQuery "<li>" + name + "</li>" this is actually a concatenate the 3 string to form 1 string. Which is passed to the jQuery function which it parsed and chaeck

if its a string : it is parsed to form a dome selector with complex manuplation to selec element on the basis of id,class,and more complex selector

if its a object : dom related to the object is selected.

if its this (javascript Object) : it is converted to jQuery object