It feels like I’ve learned a lot about jQuery in the last little bit. One thing I tend to do a lot of (especially during the development phase) is to check to make sure that a variable’s value is what I am expecting. Instead of dumping it to the webpage where the whole world can see it, you can dump it to what is called the console of your web browser. While I tend to be more of an IE guy I love the tool called Firebug. This tool is an add-on for FireFox and allows you to do some pretty nifty things.
One of these things is to view the console postings.
Let’s look at how this is done:
NOTE – You must download and install these apps in this order.
- Firefox Download
- Install and Open FireFox
- Using FireFox download FireBug and install.
Now that you have required software installed on your machine we can start coding.
Open your editor and let’s have some fun creating some variables and posting their values to the console which FireBug can read. Let’s look at these code examples.
xhtml
There are 4 li items in this xhtml code.
jQuery
This jQuery code should be read:
- Line 1 – When the document is ready run some jQuery Code.
- Line 2 – Create a variable called “i”. “I” =’s the number of list items (li) in the menu class.
- Line 3 – Dump the value of “I” to the console. In our example you will see there is 4 list items. We would expect that the output is the #4.
If you don’t already have FireFox open right now. Please open up FireFox and make sure that FireBug is open on the bottom of the screen. I believe the FireBug shortcut key is F12. Once you open firebug it should automatically be on the console tab. You will only see one number if you did things correctly. That is the number “4”. If you were to change the number of list items to 5, this number would change to 5 etc.
What happens if you add another list item? AS you can see the console is now at 5 just as you would expect!
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