jQuery: Iterate over each element of a selector

Sometimes, it is necessary to assign a value, an action, a CSS property or whatever to all elements of a jQuery selector. Today, I want to show you a way of how to do that.

So, let's have a look at the following code snippet.

$.each($(".a"), function() {
   $(this).val('abc');
});

We are using $.each for iterating. As a first parameter we are passing the jQuery selector that is $(".a") in the example, but you can also use any other selector you can imagine. As a second parameter, we are passing a function in which we can access the current element of the iteration loop with $(this).

In the example above, we are just changing the value of each element with the class "a" to "abc". Again, of course, you can use any other action you want to do within the function.

Alternative Syntax

The same can be done with the following syntax:

$(".a").each(function() {
   $(this).val('abc');
});

Also this iterates over all elements with the class "a".