Performance: selector or traversing?

Question

Hi everyone,

I was wondering which was the fastest way to apply a class on body and, let's say, all paragraphs. We can use simple selectors such as:

$("body").addClass("foo");
$("p").addClass("bar");

But also traversing methods like:

$("body").addClass("foo").find("p").addClass("bar");

Is there any difference in term of performance?

Cheers, Benjamin

Answer 1

If it was the same class you could try andSelf():

$("body").find("p").andSelf().addClass("bar");

With regard to performance, I wouldn't imagine there was much difference, if any in your examples.

Answer 2

I would suspect second version to be slightly faster because find will look for the elements matching selector among the children of the previous selector results. However in this case the difference will probably be so small that you won't even notice it.