Miles Johnson

Checking if an element exists

So with my new design, I wanted a way to keep all columns around the same height, especially so the middle doesn't look awkward. To do this, I was going to use JavaScript and get the heights of each column and then calculate. A problem was that some pages do not have the right column, so I had to test to see if the column existed. To do that, all you use is the getElementById().

var el = document.getElementById('column');
if (el != null) {
	// Column exists
}

Easy enough now isn't it. I'm not exactly sure how this is done in jQuery, as I couldn't find an answer in the documentation. It is probably done with some selector and traversing magic. Now, to make things easier, we can package this into a function to be reused over and over.

function elementExists(id) {
	return document.getElementById(id);
}
if (elementExists('column')) {
	// Column exists
}