A couple days ago, the highly esteemable Mr Jegtnes launched TIL JS: a side-project born from a desire to improve his JavaScript skills.
It’s a brilliant idea, and given two of my goals this year are to [a] ditch jQuery, and [b] get properly into Node / polish my JavaScript, I thought I’d jump on the passing bandwagon join in, thus…
Background
Anyone who’s used jQuery or any of its clones will be instantly familiar with its $(selector) syntax, which allows targetting of arbitrary elements within the DOM by CSS selector. It’s extremely powerful, and for anyone who remembers the bad old days before jQuery, makes life whole amounts easier.
In recent years, similar functionality has been added to native Javascript in the shape of the querySelector and querySelectorAll functions, the former returning a single Node, and the latter a NodeList.
However, whilst NodeList objects might look a little like array to the casual observer they aren’t, as anyone who attempts to use any of the new(-ish) array iterator functions will find out very quickly.
The magical invocation
Fortunately, converting from a NodeList to an Array is simple:
You could even abuse Javascript’s prototype inheritance and do something like:
… which would give you the ability to do this:
Those of a more Ruby-bent might prefer to_a() instead, but that feels a little too much like crossing the streams…
While I’m writing, (another) quick note on the state of this site… which basically comes down to the usual “I either seem to have the motivation to write, or the time, but never both at the same time”. I’m trying to change this, don’t hold your breath.