Question

Just wondering why the space is required here..

.load(url + (' #newsItem')

How exactly do I know when a space is needed and when it’s not? Any good resources possibly?

Answer 1

Without the space, jQuery wouldn’t know #newsItem isn’t part of the URL but the indication you want to load a page fragment.

See documentation :

Loading Page Fragments

The .load() method, unlike $.get(), allows us to specify a portion of
the remote document to be inserted. This is achieved with a special
syntax for the url parameter. If one or more space characters are
included in the string, the portion of the string following the first
space is assumed to be a jQuery selector that determines the content
to be loaded.

We could modify the example above to use only part of the document
that is fetched:

1 $(‘#result’).load(‘ajax/test.html #container’);

When this method
executes, it retrieves the content of ajax/test.html, but then jQuery
parses the returned document to find the element with an ID of
container. This element, along with its contents, is inserted into the
element with an ID of result, and the rest of the retrieved document
is discarded.