Create Your Own Custom JavaScript Dollar Function To Select An Element

By  on  

The "dollar" function has become famous in recent years due to its inception in many popular JavaScript frameworks. MooTools, for example, uses the dollar function to select a single element from the DOM. This functionality is extremely helpful as it allows you to keep your code extremely short and readable, not to mention document.getElementById(''); can get annoying quickly.

The Code

function $(id)
{
	return document.getElementById(id);
}

You don't need to use a JavaScript framework to compact your code. If you frequently select unique DOM elements, you should create a dollar function for the sake of yourself and your users.

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. To cut the number of getElementById() calls in half, you could just do:

    function $(id) {
         return document.getElementById(id);
    }
    
  2. Hi, lets make it smaller ^^

    function $(i) { return document.getElementById(i); }
  3. Can you just do:

    var $ = document.getElementById;
    

    ? I didn’t test this.

  4. Paul

    This function returns null and does not work when I do $('x').style.background='orange';

  5. Brandon
    function $(e)
    {
     if(e.substring(0,1) == '#')
     {
      return document.getElementById(e.substring(1));
     }
     else
     {
      return document.getElementByClass(e.substring(1));
     }
    }
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!