jQuery - traversing continuously with a delay

Question

I have a bunch of tabs that activate different pages of content and I'd like them to loop automatically until the user clicks on one of them.

$("#projects_list ul li a").each(function() {
 activatetab($(this));
});

So I want activatetab($(this)) to be executed every say 5000ms and once the final tab is activated it should start all over again. Can it be done this way? I can probably make a function like activate_next_tab() and then call it in setInterval() while tracking which tab was last activated and then finding the next one... but it's a bother. I want to do it this way.

Thanks

Answer 1

Something like:

var as = $("#projects_list ul li a"), i = 0, l = as.length;
setInterval(function(){
  activatetab($(as[i++ % l]))
}, 5000)

Some explanations:

• as is a jQuery object with the list of all A tags
• i is the counter
• l is the number of A tags
• the setInterval will repeat the function every 5000ms
• i++ will increment the counter at every pass, and % l will insure that you never go over the number of A and "rotate"