I love the any? and empty? convenience methods that Rails and Ruby provide, they make conditional statements much easier to read. I also really dislike the default method of checking this behavior in jQuery:
if ($('some.element').length > 0) { // ...do something }
Well, luckily jQuery is ridiculously easy to extend, so why not just mix that functionality in with a couple of quick shot plugin methods? Just add this javascript sometime after you include jQuery:
jQuery.fn.any = function() { return (this.length > 0); } jQuery.fn.none = function() { return (this.length == 0); }
That’s all you have to do! Now we can make the same call as before, but it looks a little cleaner:
if ($('some.element').any()) { // do something more readably... }
UPDATE: Apologies, I added in the empty bit as a last-second update to the post and forgot to check and realize that empty() is part of jQuery core. Updated the name to none instead.
