How do you create an element with jQuery?

Question

Do you create it like this: $('<div />') or $('<div></div>')

Is that how you create an element? Thanks.

Answer 1

Either way works just fine. Just don't forget to insert in the dom - you can use appendTo(selector) .

Answer 2

var $my_elem = $("<div/>").appendTo(document.body);
var $my_elem = $("<div class='abc'></div>").appendTo(document.body);

Then you have $my_elem represending the inserted element.

Answer 3

$('YOUR SELECTOR').append('<div />');

The <div /> will create a <div></div>

You can include classes, id's and other attributes, jQuery should figure it out and rap it up.

I included use of the append function because you are probably going to want to insert it somewhere. There is a number of similar functions you could use instead.

Answer 4

Looking at the jQuery source code , it looks like anything matching the regular expression /^<(\\w+)\\s*\\/?>(?:<\\/\\1>)?$/ will be interpreted as a "single tag" and passed directly to document.createElement (assuming no context is specified). Therefore, at least in the current implementation, there's no difference (behavior or performance) between the various formats.