Is there an “exists” function for jQuery?

Question

How can I check the existence of an element in jQuery?

The current code that I have is this:

if ($(selector).length > 0) {
    // Do something
}
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Answer 1

You can save a few bytes by writing:

if ($(selector)[0]) { ... }

This works because each jQuery object also masquerades as an array, so we can use the array dereferencing operator to get the first item from the array. It returns undefined if there is no item at the specified index.