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- Introduction
- The Selectors API
- Basic jQuery to DOM API examples
- More advanced jQuery to DOM API examples
Introduction
jQuery and other DOM libraries got a huge popularity boost in the past, among with the other features they provided, thanks to an easy way to select elements on a page.
Traditionally browsers provided just a single way to select a DOM element - by its id
attribute, with getElementById()
, a method offered by the document
object.
The Selectors API
Since 2013 the Selectors API, the DOM allows you to use two more useful methods:
document.querySelector()
document.querySelectorAll()
They can be safely used, as caniuse.com tells us, and they are even fully supported on IE9 in addition to all the other modern browsers, so there is no reason to avoid them, unless you need to support IE8 (which has partial support) and below.
They accept any CSS selector, so you are no longer limited by selecting elements by id
.
document.querySelector()
returns a single element, the first founddocument.querySelectorAll()
returns all the elements, wrapped in a NodeList object.
These are all valid selectors:
document.querySelector('#test')
document.querySelector('.my-class')
document.querySelector('#test .my-class')
document.querySelector('a:hover')
Basic jQuery to DOM API examples
Here below is a translation of the popular jQuery API into native DOM API calls.
Select by id
$('#test')
document.querySelector('#test')
We use querySelector
since an id
is unique in the page
Select by class
$('.test')
document.querySelectorAll('.test')
Select by tag name
$('div')
document.querySelectorAll('div')
More advanced jQuery to DOM API examples
Select multiple items
$('div, span')
document.querySelectorAll('div, span')
Select by HTML attribute value
$('[data-example="test"]')
document.querySelectorAll('[data-example="test"]')
Select by CSS pseudo class
$(':nth-child(4n)')
document.querySelectorAll(':nth-child(4n)')
Select the descendants of an element
For example all li
elements under #test
:
$('#test li')
document.querySelectorAll('#test li')
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More browser tutorials:
- Some useful tricks available in HTML5
- How I made a CMS-based website work offline
- The Complete Guide to Progressive Web Apps
- The Fetch API
- The Push API Guide
- The Channel Messaging API
- Service Workers Tutorial
- The Cache API Guide
- The Notification API Guide
- Dive into IndexedDB
- The Selectors API: querySelector and querySelectorAll
- Efficiently load JavaScript with defer and async
- The Document Object Model (DOM)
- The Web Storage API: local storage and session storage
- Learn how HTTP Cookies work
- The History API
- The WebP Image Format
- XMLHttpRequest (XHR)
- An in-depth SVG tutorial
- What are Data URLs
- Roadmap to learn the Web Platform
- CORS, Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
- Web Workers
- The requestAnimationFrame() guide
- What is the Doctype
- Working with the DevTools Console and the Console API
- The Speech Synthesis API
- How to wait for the DOM ready event in plain JavaScript
- How to add a class to a DOM element
- How to loop over DOM elements from querySelectorAll
- How to remove a class from a DOM element
- How to check if a DOM element has a class
- How to change a DOM node value
- How to add a click event to a list of DOM elements returned from querySelectorAll
- WebRTC, the Real Time Web API
- How to get the scroll position of an element in JavaScript
- How to replace a DOM element
- How to only accept images in an input file field
- Why use a preview version of a browser?
- The Blob Object
- The File Object
- The FileReader Object
- The FileList Object
- ArrayBuffer
- ArrayBufferView
- The URL Object
- Typed Arrays
- The DataView Object
- The BroadcastChannel API
- The Streams API
- The FormData Object
- The Navigator Object
- How to use the Geolocation API
- How to use getUserMedia()
- How to use the Drag and Drop API
- How to work with scrolling on Web Pages
- Handling forms in JavaScript
- Keyboard events
- Mouse events
- Touch events
- How to remove all children from a DOM element
- How to create an HTML attribute using vanilla Javascript
- How to check if a checkbox is checked using JavaScript?
- How to copy to the clipboard using JavaScript
- How to disable a button using JavaScript
- How to make a page editable in the browser
- How to get query string values in JavaScript with URLSearchParams
- How to remove all CSS from a page at once
- How to use insertAdjacentHTML
- Safari, warn before quitting
- How to add an image to the DOM using JavaScript
- How to reset a form
- How to use Google Fonts