Retrieving native DOM elements from jQuery objects?

Question

How can I get jQuery to return the native DOM elements it encapsulates?

Answer 1

Other people have already directly answered the question. Use the get() method.

However, most of the time you want to use jQuery methods to do the manipulation as opposed to getting access to the raw DOM element and then modifying it using "standard" JavaScript.

For example, with jQuery you can just say $('mySelector').addClass('myClass') to add a CSS class to a DOM element. This is much more complicated (and browser specific) using direct DOM manipulation. This concept extends to almost every other DOM manipulation you would care to do.