I've starting using the Wijmo toolkit, and came across quite a few example selectors similar to this in their documentation pages:
$(":input[type='radio']").wijradio();
I'd have written mine like this:
$('input[type=radio]').wijradio();
Do these do the same or is there something I'm missing?
Note that there are two differences above: the first selector is prefixed with a colon and has quotes for the input type.
:input
is a jQuery extension while input
is a CSS selector.
textarea
, button
, and select
elements would be matched by the former, but not the latter.
The latter is faster, so use it for your specific radio
example. Use :input
when you want "all form elements" even if they aren't strictly <input>
tags. Even in that case, the recommendation is to use a standard CSS selector first, then use .filter(':input')
on that set.
Because :input is a jQuery extension and not part of the CSS
specification, queries using :input cannot take advantage of the
performance boost provided by the native DOM querySelectorAll()
method. To achieve the best performance when using :input to select
elements, first select the elements using a pure CSS selector, then
use .filter(":input").
In the 1.7.2 source, the :input filter tests a regular expression against the nodeName:
input: function( elem ) {
return (/input|select|textarea|button/i).test( elem.nodeName );
},
the $("input")
selector will choose only elements of the type input
while the $(":input")
selector will catch all the inputs elements (such as textarea, select, input etc...)
for further information, go the jQuery official documentation about the :input
selector at:
http://api.jquery.com/input-selector/
The :input
selector basically selects all form
controls(input, textarea, select and button elements) where as input
selector selects all the elements by tag name input
.
Since radio button is a form
element and also it uses input
tag so they both can be used to select radio button. However both approaches differ the way they find the elements and thus each have different performance benefits.