Web Inspector and Firefox Dollar Functions

By  on  

Dollar Functions

Many of you probably didn't know this but WebKit-based like Safari and Chrome, in addition to Firefox, contain special dollar functions within the console object that allow you to grab elements within the current page.  While I've not determined the use of each method, a few of them are obvious:

// Dollar method
// Returns an element by ID
$ = function (id) {
	return document.getElementById.apply(document, arguments);
}

// Bling-Bling method
// Returns array of nodes found by QSA
$$ = function(selector) {
	return document.querySelectorAll.apply(document, arguments);
}

// Broke method
// returns the currently selected element within the console HTML pane
$0 = function toString() { [native code] }

The $1 - $4 methods are returning undefined, oddly enough.

Dollar Functions

It's not clear to me what the last few methods do.  Maybe they're placeholders for feature methods but they continue to be undefined for now.

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Google Extension Effect with CSS or jQuery or MooTools JavaScript

    Both of the two great browser vendors, Google and Mozilla, have Extensions pages that utilize simple but classy animation effects to enhance the page. One of the extensions used by Google is a basic margin-top animation to switch between two panes: a graphic pane...

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Table Plugin

    I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class. The XHTML You may have as many tables as...

Discussion

  1. Brian

    $0 returns whatever you have selected in the Elements tab.

    These all work in Firebug too, by the way.

  2. $0 and $1 return the currently selected DOM element and the previously selected DOM element, respectively. I haven’t yet found a use for this while debugging, mainly because selecting elements in the inspector and debugging in the console seem (for me at least) to be disconnected tasks, but maybe there will be a reason some day? ^_^

    Not sure about webkit’s inspector, but you can find the API for firebug’s CLI here: http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Command_Line_API

  3. Matthew F

    Perhaps if they plan to use it in the future, they have to reserve it now so that the dom-modifying frameworks don’t start using it :)

  4. Didn’t know about this, the bling-bling method is cool though, haha.

  5. farkob

    Now I get it, this is why Douglas Crockford says you shouldn’t use $ functions.

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