Question

context: I’m building a favouriting
system that uses html localstorage
API (with a php session fallback). If a favourited item is on the
page, add the class ‘favourite’ with js…

If I don’t know whether the elements id will be present on the page. Is it better to check whether it exists first, or will jQuery return false just as efficiently?

Answer 1

There is test code for a similar situation on jsperf.

if ($('#item_123').length === 1) {
 $('#item_123').remove();
}

VS

 $('#item_123').remove(); //this turned out slower for me in chrome 13