Question

Does it hurt in performance when I loop through list-items and add a click-handler to all separate items?

The reason I do this is because I would only like to make the list item clickable if it contains an hyperlink.

The code I’m currently using is:

$('ul.paginator li').each(function() {
  if ($('a', this).length > 0) {
    $(this).css('cursor', 'pointer');
    $(this).click(function() {
      location.href = $('a', this).attr('href');
    });
  }
});

Answer 1

I’m not sure how much it might hurt performance, but have you considered using a somewhat simplified jQuery selector:

$('ul.paginator li:has(a)').each(
    function(){
        $(this).css('cursor','pointer').click(
            function(){
                location.href = $(this).find('a').attr('href');
            });
    });

Incidentally, the performance would depend on the number of elements you’re searching through more than anything else. Just a few and it’s likely to be imperceptible, a few thousand and it will (probably) be noticeable.

---

Edited to reduce the expense of has():

$('ul.paginator li a').each(
    function(){
        var address = this.href;
        $(this).closest('li').css('cursor','pointer').click(
            function(){
                location.href = address;
            });
    });

This should be less expensive, as it will select only those a elements within an li, and then move up to affect that li element.