Test if two elements are the same

Question

I would suspect this to work at first:

if ($(\'#element\') == $(\'#element\')) alert(\'hello\');

But it does not. How does one test if ele

Answer 1

As somebody already told, the same HTML element wrapped in two different moments generates two different jQuery instances, so they can never be equal.

Instead, the HTML elements wrapped may be compared that way, since the memory location they occupy is the same if it is the same HTML element, so:

var LIs = $('#myUL LI');
var $match = $('#myUL').find('LI:first');

alert(LIs.eq(0) === $match); // false
alert(LIs.get(0) === $match.get(0)) // TRUE! yeah :)

Best regards!

Answer 2

Like silky or Santi said, a unique ID or class would be the easiest way to test. The reason your if statements don't work like you'd expect is because it's comparing 2 objects and seeing if they're the same object in memory.

Since it's always a new object getting created by $(this), they can never equal each other. That's why you have to test on a property of the object. You could get away with no unique id/class if each openActivity element was guaranteed to have different content that you could test against.

Answer 3

I would use addClass() for marking the opened and you can check that easily.

Answer 4

Or just

if (openActivity[0] == this) alert('hello');

(without a new jQuery instance ;-)

Answer 5

This should work:

if ($(this)[0] === $(this)[0]) alert('hello');

so should this

if (openActivity[0] == $(this)[0]) alert('hello');

Answer 6

As of jquery 1.6 you can now simply do:

$element1.is($element2)