Check if a div exists with jquery

Question

Yes  I know this has been asked a lot  But  it confuses me  since the results on google for this search show different methods  listed below     document  ready function         if      DivID   length           alert  Found with Length               if      DivID   length  gt  0             alert  Found with Length bigger then Zero               if      DivID      null             alert  Found with Not Null                Which one of the 3 is the correct way to check if the div exists   EDIT  It s a pitty to see that people do not want to learn what is the better approach from the three different methods  This question is not actually on  How to check if a div exists  but it s about which method is better  and  if someone could explain  why it it better

User · Accepted Answer

The first is the most concise  I would go with that  The first two are the same  but the first is just that little bit shorter  so you ll save on bytes  The third is plain wrong  because that condition will always evaluate true because the object will never be null or falsy for that matter

User · Answer

If you are simply checking for the existence of an ID  there is no need to go into jQuery  you could simply   if document getElementById  yourid       null        getElementById returns null if it can t be found   Reference   If however you plan to use the jQuery object later i d suggest     document  ready function         var  myDiv       DivID         if    myDiv length             you can now reuse   myDiv here  without having to select it again                A selector always returns a jQuery object  so there shouldn t be a need to check against null  I d be interested if there is an edge case where you need to check for null - but I don t think there is    If the selector doesn t find anything then length     0 which is  falsy   when converted to bool its false   So if it finds something then it should be  truthy  - so you don t need to check for   0  Just for it s  truthyness

User · Answer

As karim79 mentioned  the first is the most concise  However I could argue that the second is more understandable as it is not obvious known to some Javascript jQuery programmers that non-zero false values are evaluated to true in if-statements  And because of that  the third method is incorrect

[jquery] Check if a div exists with jquery

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