Unique element ID, even if element doesn't have one

Question

I\'m writing a GreaseMonkey script where I\'m iterating through a bunch of elements. For each element, I need a string ID that I can use to reference that element later. The

Answer 1

UPDATE: Closures are indeed the answer. So after fiddling with it some more, I figured out why closures were initially problematic and how to fix it. The tricky thing with a closure is you have to be careful when iterating through the elements not to end up with all of your closures referencing the same element. For example, this doesn't work:

for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
    var element = elements[i];
    var button = document.createElement("button");
    button.addEventListener("click", function(ev) {
        // do something with element here
    }, false)
}

But this does:

var buildListener = function(element) {
    return function(ev) {
        // do something with event here
    };
};

for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
    var element = elements[i];
    var button = document.createElement("button");
    button.addEventListener("click", buildListener(element), false)
}

Anyway, I decided not to select one answer because the question had two answers: 1) No, there are no internal IDs you can use; 2) you should use closures for this. So I simply upvoted the first people to say whether there were internal IDs or who recommended generating IDs, plus anyone who mentioned closures. Thanks for the help!