Question

Trying to get a grip on CoffeeScript and jQuery by doing the Code School CoffeeScript course.

One of the excerpts used is $("<li>" + name + "</li>"). I managed to figure out that $ is an alias for jQuery (right?), so I guess this means we’re calling the jQuery function with a string (name is a string, surrounded by two literals).

So… what does the jQuery function do on its own? Tried looking at api.jquery.com, having trouble figuring it out. Thank you!

Answer 1

In this instance you are using jQuery to create a DOM element.

An <li> with some (text I’m assuming) that is in the variable name

If a string is passed as the parameter to $(), jQuery examines the
string to see if it looks like HTML (i.e., it has somewhere
within the string). If not, the string is interpreted as a selector
expression, as explained above. But if the string appears to be an
HTML snippet, jQuery attempts to create new DOM elements as described
by the HTML. Then a jQuery object is created and returned that refers
to these elements.

The structure for creating DOM elements with jQuery is:

$( html, props )

Check out these jQuery Docs to read more about the jQuery selector.

html: A string defining a single, standalone, HTML element (e.g.
or ).

props: A map of attributes, events, and methods to call on the
newly-created element.

As we can see in your example we only pass html. $("<li>" + name + "</li>")