Question

How can I find out if a certain element has another element as a child?
And if it doesn’t, append a new one to it and then return it.

I tried it with:

var myel = ($('> div.my', this).length > 0)
    ? $('> div.my', this)
    : $(this).append('<div class="my"></div>').css('opacity', 0);

but even though it creates my element if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t return it…

Answer 1

How about this?

var myel = $('> div.my', this).length ? $('> div.my', this) : $('<div class="my"></div>').css('opacity', 0).appendTo(this);