Question

I’m looking for an advanced function to select elements in the dom without using jQuery or any other library.

Something that will accomplish the same thing that the $(selector) function does in jQuery.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The best thing you can use is querySelectorAll, which allows you to select using a CSS selector, just as you would with jQuery:

var links = document.querySelectorAll('#someEl a.someClass');

You would then need to loop through links to do whatever you wanted to do to the elements. Note that a lot of jQuery-provided utility functions (e.g. addClass) will not be available. Some utility functions are available in modern browsers (and more will come when DOM4 is adopted) but it will be a lot clunkier than jQuery makes it. That’s the price you’ll pay.