Question

I do this (its working fine I assign width amongst other things to all anchors) :

var anchors = jQuery("#myDiv a");

However I then want to select a specific anchor from the var, this doesn’t work :

anchors("#anchor01").addClass("myClass");

and neither does this :

anchors.find("#anchor01").addClass("myClass");

I realize I could do jQuery("#anchor01") but I figure its quicker to select from the already reduced elements stored in var. This must be so obvious …

Answer 1

Use the filter()^[docs] method.

anchors.filter("#anchor01").addClass("myClass");

Of if you didn’t mind a little departure from jQuery, you could use getElementsByTagName(), and access the element with the ID as a property of the NodeList.

var anchors = document.getElementById("myDiv").getElementsByTagName("a");

$( anchors.anchor01 ).addClass("myClass");

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/Tphfb/

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EDIT:

Using the NodeList is by far the fastest. Here’s a jsPerf.

Plus, because it’s a “live list” it will automatically update when anchors are added to or removed from myDiv.