jquery - group or concatenate jquery objects created by a loop, so to use appendTo only once

Question

I have a for loop to generate a row of divs, my code is

for(j=0; j<7; j++) {
   $('<div/>', {
     id: 'unique',
     html: 'whatever'
}).appendTo('#container');

This code seems to seek out #container for every iteration and appends a new div to it.

How do write the code so that I can go create all the divs first and then append to the container all at once? Sorry, I tried searching for keywords such as concatenate/group/add jquery objects, and don't seem to have the right search results.

TIA

Answer 1

Xander's solution should work just fine. I personally don't like working with 'long' HTML strings in js. Here is a solution that looks more similar to your code.

var elements = [];
for(j=0; j<7; j++) {
    var currentElement = $('<div>', { id: i, text: 'div' });
    elements.push(currentElement[0]);
}
$('#container').append(elements);

Answer 2

This could help

var htm = '';
for(j=0; j<7; j++) {
     htm+= '<div id="unique_'+i+'">whatever</div>';
}

$('#container').html(htm); // Or append instead of html