Question

in all jquery examples i see this kind of code:

$('.menu a').each(function(){
 $(this).animate({paddingLeft: $(this).width()}, 200);
 });

What they do here is create a function ‘on the fly’ (is that called an anonymous delegate?)

but what if i have an existing function, which wants to have access to the $(this) also?

let’s say i have this function:

function doAnimate(ctl){
  //do something here
{

How can i use that function in the jquery statement?

Reason i ask is that i want to use this function in more jquery statements, and i don’t want to type the anonymous delegate multiple times.

I’ve tried this, but that gives me an error:

$("#<%=txtReceiverEmailEcard1.ClientID  %>").blur(blurWatermark($(this), 'Your email address'));

Answer 1

This is from the jQuery API documentation

More importantly, the callback is
fired in the context of the current
DOM element, so the keyword this
refers to the element.

And the signature of the method is

.each( function(index, Element) )

function(index, Element)A function to
execute for each matched element.

You can then write

$('.menu a').each(myFunction)

function myFunction(index, Element) { 
    alert(this); /* this points to the element */
}

That basically means that you can get all kind of nice information (like index) to your callback.