Question

How do I determine if two jQuery objects are equal? I would like to be able to search an array for a particular jQuery object.

$.inArray(jqobj, my_array);//-1    
alert($("#deviceTypeRoot") == $("#deviceTypeRoot"));//False
alert($("#deviceTypeRoot") === $("#deviceTypeRoot"));//False

Answer 1

Since jQuery 1.6, you can use .is. Below is the answer from over a year ago…

var a = $('#foo');
var b = a;


if (a.is(b)) {
    // the same object!
}

---

If you want to see if two variables are actually the same object, eg:

var a = $('#foo');
var b = a;

…then you can check their unique IDs. Every time you create a new jQuery object it gets an id.

if ($.data(a) == $.data(b)) {
    // the same object!
}

Though, the same could be achieved with a simple a === b, the above might at least show the next developer exactly what you’re testing for.

In any case, that’s probably not what you’re after. If you wanted to check if two different jQuery objects contain the same set of elements, the you could use this:

$.fn.equals = function(compareTo) {
  if (!compareTo || this.length != compareTo.length) {
    return false;
  }
  for (var i = 0; i < this.length; ++i) {
    if (this[i] !== compareTo[i]) {
      return false;
    }
  }
  return true;
};

_Source

var a = $('p');
var b = $('p');
if (a.equals(b)) {
    // same set
}