Patterns for avoiding jQuery silent fails

Question

Is there any good practice to avoid your jQuery code silently fail?

For example:

$(\'.this #is:my(complexSelector)\').doSomething();

Answer 1

It's not necessarily wrong when a selector matches nothing; it depends on your application. You could write your own validateNonEmpty plugin:

jQuery.fn.validateNonEmpty = function() {
  if (this.length == 0)
    throw "Empty list detected - selector: " + this.selector;
  return this; // thanks @Matt
};

Then you can do:

$('something something').validateNonEmpty().doSomething();

Also, note that you want to check to see if the length is 0, not less than 0.