Is there a better way to return an object if it exists in javascript?

Question

I have a function that searches for images in different ways, one by one, and for each trial, if it finds one, the function returns that image.

The code becomes quite clunky if I search for various images, is there a more elegant way of trying to find an object and returning it if it exists?

var image = $('a.jqzoom')[0].getAttribute('href');
if (image)
    return image;

Then, I keep trying other ways to find images one after the other, for example:

var image = $('a.asdf')[0].getAttribute('href');
if (image)
    return image;

Answer 1

Consider:

return $('a.jqzoom')[0].href || <value if not found>;

so if no element is found, the first part returns undefined and the second value is returned. A more jQuery-ish way is:

return $('a.jqzoom').prop('href') || <value if not found>;

But I'm a bit puzzled, isn't the href of an A element supposed to be a document (or some other text based object), not an image?

Answer 2

If your function doesn't end with the return statement it has the return value undefined . So you should just write:

return $('a.asdf')[0].getAttribute('href');

It's basically equivalent to what you already got (it's a little looser, by virtue of the truthy check you got.