Question

Hello I’m a newcomer in JavaScript and JQuery language. I started to see some examples of JQuery script.

i have the following code segment:

 <script type="text/javascript">

   $(document).ready(function(){

   $("p").click(function(){

   $(this).hide();

    });

  });

</script>

My question: what is the meaning of word “this” in this line of code:

          $(this).hide();

Answer 1

It refers to each of p tags in your selector $("p") that gets clicked. For example, you can see html of each p tag you clicked on like this:

$("p").click(function(){
   alert($(this).html());
});

Notice also that $(this) and this in above context mean different things. The latter this refers to DOM element itself which won’t have jQuery methods/properties available to it, for example:

$("p").click(function(){
   alert(this.html());
});

Won’t work because html() won’t be available because this refers to DOM element in there. So if you want to use jQuery methods, use $(this) instead.