Question

I have read another post/question regarding jquery variables and it was useful but I’m still having trouble understanding…
Below is a bit of code from a simple tabbed content functionality that I’m modifying.

Please could someone explain why this works:

$tabMenuItem.click(function() {     
    var activetab = $(this).find('a').attr('href'); 
    $(activetab).show(); //show the active ID content
    return false;
});

..and why this throws a ‘$activetab.show is not a function’ error:

$tabMenuItem.click(function() {     
    var $activetab = $(this).find('a').attr('href'); 
    $activetab.show(); //show the active ID content     
    return false;
});

From what I can gather, both ways show the variable to hold the correct value – only the second version won’t let me attach a jquery method/function to it…?

I’m not a strong programmer, and any clarification would be appreciated!

Answer 1

activetab is the href of the selected anchor tag. show() is a jQuery method. The method needs to be called by a jQuery object. $(activetab) is a jQuery object. Albeit probably not what you want.

If you wanted the second to work and using $ to prefix your variables, you still need to make it a jQuery object. You can do so by $($activetab).show().