In jQuery, is it faster to check if an element exists before trying to bind event handlers?

Question

Is it faster to first check if an element exists, and then bind event handlers, like this:

if( $(\'.selector\').length ) {
    $(\'.selector\').on(\'click\',         


        

Answer 1

Use the binding directly.

$('selector').on('click',function() {
    // Do stuff on click
}

If if there are no elements with the specified selector, it won't do anything - not even post an error, which means that actual check for the element would be doing the same thing twice. I wouldn't call it exactly a check of the existence of an element, but the way this is implemented in jQuery certainly acts that way.