Question

Okay, normally I would consider myself an intermediate user of jquery, but this seems like a very noob issue that I’m not quite sure how to code.

I have one div that I want to run a function against. The only way I’m aware of how to do this is something like…

$("#divname").each(function(){
  dostuff();
});

This seems like a bit more work when I know there will only be one element. I tried this…

$("#divname", function(){ 
  console.log($(this));
});

… but it writes out the whole dom. I just want to run the function on this one element. How do I do that?

Answer 1

If you maintain that each element in HTML DOM has unique id that means no two elements have same id, then $('#divname') always return a single element and $('#divname').each() will run one time. not more than one.

Now in your case you want something like

dosomething( $('#divname') );

For example:

function doSomething( el ) {
   el.append('<span>hello</span>');
}

 doSomething( $('#divname') );

DEMO