Question

I need to see if an object is present on the page by its selector.

This WOULD normally do it:

startpageentry = $('#' + startpageid)

But that doesn’t return anything. I need a boolean I can put into an if statement like this:

if (startpageentry != ‘false’) {}

How can I do this?

Answer 1

There is no boolean for that because it would prevent from chaining.
You could use $(something).length>0.
But if you need to run in over and over again, I made a little jQuery plugin which is called doesExist()

/* doesExist PLUGIN (c) MS */
/* (c) Michael Stadler(MS), */
(function($){
$.fn.doesExist = function()
{
return jQuery(this).length > 0;
};
})(jQuery);

The usage of it would be

if($('#something').doesExist()){
      //doesExist returns a boolean
}