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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Photo Stack Effect with Pure CSS Animations or MooTools

    My favorite technological piece of Google Plus is its image upload and display handling.  You can drag the images from your OS right into a browser's DIV element, the images upload right before your eyes, and the albums page displays a sexy photo deck animation...

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

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!