No Mod Required

As I mentioned yesterday I wanted to offer up an alternative to the browser crushing example I made to illustrate the point about Javascript Objects. So here it is…

Instead of using getElementsByTagName("a") and watching the count grow towards infinity, I simply added a new function which does the same thing as getElementsByTagName, except that it takes a "snapshot" of the nodeList and turns it into a plain old Array. So, unlike a variable created with getElementsByTagName, this one will not track changes to the underlying DOM collection.* I’ve illustrated this with a count of the members of the two collections before and after the manipulations are run.

Here’s a sample:

And here’s the function

function getStaticCollectionByTagName(tag, node) {
  //just like getElementsByTagName, we want to open up and optional context node 
  if (node==undefined) {
  //if it's not passed in as an argument, we set it to be document 
  node=document
  }
  //we build a variable with the original collection 
  var temp_array = node.getElementsByTagName(tag);
  //and a new array to hold them 
  var static_results = new Array;
  //then we just loop through and copy each into the new array 
  for (i=0; i<temp_array.length;i++) {
  static_results.push(temp_array[i]);
  }
  //and return it 
  return static_results;
  }

As a note, feel free to comment on any/all of the code articles I write here. I’m mostly writing this stuff to push my own knowledge and understanding so if you see something I can do better, something that I’ve missed or something that’s just plain silly, feel free to let me know

*it WILL track the individual objects that make up the collection as those are passed to the new array as Object references.