jQuery Function of the Week: grep

This week's jQuery function of the week is grep.  According to the jQuery docs grep:

Finds the elements of an array which satisfy a filter function. The original array is not affected.

There is only a single signature for the grep function: $.grep(array, function(element, index) [,invert]). The function being passed in should return a truthy value or a falsy value based on the input argument.  If the invert parameter is left out, or is false then the grep function will return a new array with all the items that the satisfy the truth test function that was passed in.  If invert is set to true, grep will return a new array with all the items that do not satisfy the truth test function.

Lets take a look at looping through an array of text and removing the word "the":

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Now lets take a look at the same code, but with the invert parameter set to true:

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You'll see that only the word "the" is returned.

Check out the all of the jQuery function's of the week.

jQuery Function Of The Week: nextAll

I'm super busy this week so this week's jQuery function of the week is going to be an easy one: nextAll.  According to the jQuery Documentation use nextAll to:

Get all following siblings of each element in the set of matched elements, optionally filtered by a selector.

Lets say we had a list of items, and we wanted to highlight every vegetable  Using nextAll would look like this:

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Optionally a selector can be passed into nextAll to further filter the results.  Here we'll only select the even vegetables that are after our original selector:

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Check out the all of the jQuery function's of the week.

jQuery Function Of The Week: proxy

In my JavaScript fundamentals presentations I have a section that talks about scope and how it can become confusing when using jQuery.  The reason for this is becuase jQuery normalizes the this scope in its function calls.  In other words when inside a jQuery method call this usually refers to the DOM elements in the jQuery set.

This can be clearly illustraed in a simple jQuery event callback (note use your browsers console, not jsbin's for the meantime):

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This can become a problem when we try to write reusable code. Lets say we want to put our event handler into a object and then call it when a user clicks on a link:

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If you run the code you'll see that you get "Hello, undefined" instead of "Hello, Homer Simpson". The reason is simple, jQuery used the link as the context of this where no myName property exists. Enter jQuery.proxy.

According to the jQuery Documentation, the proxy function:

Takes a function and returns a new one that will always have a particular context.

This means that by using the $.proxy function we can make our callback run in the proper context, in this case itself:

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The change is subtle, but the result is exactly what we want.   Now, at this point you might be asking yourself, "isn't this the same thing as using the apply() or call() methods (mdn apply documentation)?   The answer is yes...and no.  Lets look at how to get the desired result using apply():

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If you look closely you'll notice a slight difference, the callback is now invoked in an anonymous function instead of passed directly to the on() method.  This is because the apply method invokes the function immediately whereas jQuery's proxy function only returns a reference function for later invocation.   This is a bit nicer because it makes for slightly more terse code.

In addition the proxy() function does a few more things:

• it makes sure that the function passed in is actually a function
• it assignes a unique ID to the function.  This is very important because when trying to unbind a function you may not be unbinding the proper function if you are passing in the function to the off() method.  Its best to always use namespaced events when using on() and off() with $.proxy().

Check out the all of the jQuery function's of the week.