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
}
<         


        

Answer 1

I stumbled upon this question and i'd like to share a snippet of code i currently use:

$.fn.exists = function(callback) {
    var self = this;
    var wrapper = (function(){
            function notExists () {}

            notExists.prototype.otherwise = function(fallback){
                if (!self.length) {                    
                    fallback.call();
                }
            };

            return new notExists;
        })();

    if(self.length) {
        callback.call();    
    }

    return wrapper;
}

And now i can write code like this -

$("#elem").exists(function(){
    alert ("it exists");
}).otherwise(function(){
    alert ("it doesn't exist");
});

It might seem a lot of code, but when written in CoffeeScript it is quite small:

$.fn.exists = (callback) ->
    exists = @length
    callback.call() if exists        
    new class
       otherwise: (fallback) ->            
            fallback.call() if not exists