Creating an Array of tags using JavaScript

Question

var buttonArray = [
    document.getElementById('underline'),
    document.getElementById('bold'),
    document.getElementById('italic'),
    document.getElementById('tnr'),
    document.getElementById('ss'),
    document.getElementById('red'),
    document.getElementById('green'),
    document.getElementById('blue')
];

Can you do this? Or is it too abstract?

Have you tried running your code? Or are you trying to create elements instead of just selecting them? — Blender
– Blender, Commented Feb 10, 2013 at 23:10
Why don't you give all those elements the same class? Then it would be documents.getElementsByClassName('foo') or document.querySelectorAll('.foo'). But apart from that it will work fine. — Felix Kling
– Felix Kling, Commented Feb 10, 2013 at 23:13

SLaks · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-10 23:11:06Z

2

Yes; that will work fine.

You can make it more elegant like this:

var buttonArray = [ "underline", ... ]
                  .map(document.getElementById.bind(document));

answered Feb 10, 2013 at 23:11

SLaks

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6 Comments

Mattias Buelens Over a year ago

Surely it's more elegant, but map and bind aren't widely supported yet so you'll need to shim them for older browsers. A simple for-loop to transform the tags into elements is always supported and still quite elegant.

VH-NZZ Over a year ago

@Slaks: Why do you need to call ultimately bind(document) on getElementById? I noticed that it won't work otherwise, but wouldn't document.getElementById already be bound to document?

SLaks Over a year ago

@okiharaherbst: No; document.getElementById is a reference to an unbound function. this is set depending on the reference you call it from.

VH-NZZ Over a year ago

@SLaks: My bad, an immediate similarity with reflection in Java is, indeed, that the invoke(...) method on a Method object also takes an instance to call it (or bind it) upon as first argument. Many thanks anyway (reading up on bind() in JS – The definitive guide).

SLaks Over a year ago

@okiharaherbst: Javascript has no equivalent to reflection. JS allows the function itself to be passed as an object.

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