Question

In a script I’m writing, I’ve noticed there are two currently working ways to ‘unbind’ an event from an element.

$("elementName").each( function() { $(this).unbind('click'); });

And This way…

$("elementName").unbind('click'); });

I know .each loops through the elements but the second scripts appears to work just as well. So what am I missing, why use .each?

Answer 1

There’s no reason to use .each in this case. Most jQuery functions are intended to work on groups of matched elements so $("elementName").unbind('click') is best way to apply unbind to multiple elements at once; however, if you like typing you could use the .each iterator and do them one a time.

Generally you’ll use .each when you want to do something different to some or all of the matched elements. For example:

$('a').each(function(i) { $(this).addClass('pancakes' + i) });

would add a different class to each <a> and would be an appropriate use of .each. Or an unbind example:

$('a').each(function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    if($this.data('where-is') == 'pancakes-house')
        $this.unbind('click');
    // Yes, there are other ways to do this, this is just an illustrative example.
});