Question

Is there a better way to concatenate strings that have “‘s (such as HTML tag attribute definitions) in jQuery than escaping the quote?

Escapy Example:

$(this).prepend("<label for=\""+$(this).attr("id")+"\">"+"a"+"</label>");

Answer 1

You can use the object method of creation ($(html, props)), like this:

$('<label />', { for: this.id, text: 'a' }).prependTo(this);
//or:
$(this).prepend($('<label />', { for: this.id, text: 'a' }));

This has the advantage of calling .text() internally, taking care of any encoding issues. Also, if you’re doing this a lot, it’ll be faster, since the HTML fragment is consistent and cached, so a clone of the node is used, rather than turning a string into a document fragment each time. The more elements like this you’re creating, the faster it is over the string method. For the same caching reasons, the bigger the element (up to a 512 char string) the bigger the gains.