Chapter 6. jQuery utility functions

 

This chapter covers

  • The jQuery browser detection flags
  • Using other libraries with jQuery
  • Functions for manipulating arrays
  • Extending and merging objects
  • Dynamically loading new script

Up to this point, we’ve spent a fair number of chapters examining jQuery commands—the term that we’ve applied to methods that operate upon a set of DOM elements wrapped by the $() function. But you may recall that way back in chapter 1, we also introduced the concept of utility functions—functions namespaced by $ that don’t operate on a wrapped set. These functions could be thought of as top-level functions except that they are defined on the $ instance rather than window.

Generally, these functions either operate upon JavaScript objects other than DOM elements (that’s the purview of the commands after all), or they perform some non-object-related operation.

You may wonder why we waited until this chapter to introduce these functions. Well, we had two primary reasons, which follow:

6.1. Using the jQuery flags

6.2. Using other libraries with jQuery

6.3. Manipulating JavaScript objects and collections

6.4. Dynamically loading scripts

6.5. Summary