end() function

Question

The end() function in jQuery reverts the element set back to what it was before the last destructive change, so I can see how it's supposed to be used, but I've seen some code examples, eg: on alistapart (which were probably from older versions of jQuery - the article is from 2006) which finished every statement off with .end(). eg:

$( 'form.cmxform' ).hide().end();

• Does this have any effect?
• Is it something I should also be doing?
• What does the above code even return?

Answer 1

That end() doesn't do anything. There's no point to coding like that. It will return $('#myBox') -- the example is pretty poor. More interesting is something like this:

$('#myBox').show ().children ('.myClass').hide ().end ().blink ();

Which will show myBox, hide the specified children, and then blink the box. There are more interesting examples here:

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Aug/15/jquery/

such as:

$('form#login')
    // hide all the labels inside the form with the 'optional' class
    .find('label.optional').hide().end()
    // add a red border to any password fields in the form
    .find('input:password').css('border', '1px solid red').end()
    // add a submit handler to the form
    .submit(function(){
        return confirm('Are you sure you want to submit?');
    });