Question

I would like to know if jQuery or a jQuery plugin has a function that does what the following function does:

function $array(a /* an ARRAY */, f /* a function */) {
    var $res = $();
    for (var i = 0; i < a.length; ++i)
        /* Notice: The result of evaluating f(a[i])
         *         shall always be a jQuery selector
         */
        $res.add(f(a[i]));
    return $res;
}

I find this function very useful, but I don’t want to reimplement it if it already exists.

---

EDIT 1:

I admit the question was not particularly clear. I want to be able to do something like:

$('<select>')
.append($array([
    { value: 0, name: 'Item 0' },
    { value: 1, name: 'Item 1' },
    { value: 2, name: 'Item 2' }
], function(option) {
    return $('<option>')
    .val(option.value)
    .html(option.name);
}))
.appendTo('body');

Answer 1

I think this is map.

Actually, that’s not quite right if the input of your function is not a jQuery object. There’s also jQuery.map, which you could use to make an array-of-jQuery-objects, but doesn’t return a jQuery object itself. So I think neither is exactly what you’ve got there.