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JavaScript

nicholas maddren
nicholas maddren
12,793 Points
Posted by nicholas maddren
nicholas maddren
12,793 Points

How does jQuery know to put the caption inside of the <p> tag?

Hey guys being following jQuery basics and I'm just wondering how jQuery knows how to put the captions in-between the <p> tags?

Here is the code:

var $overlay = $('<div id="overlay"></div');
var $image = $("<img>");
var $caption = $("<p></p>");

$overlay.append($image);

$overlay.append($caption);

$("body").append($overlay);

$("#imageGallery a").click(function(event){
  event.preventDefault();
  var href = $(this).attr("href");
  $image.attr("src", href);
  $overlay.show();


  var captionText = $(this).children("img").attr("alt");
  $caption.text(captionText);
});

$overlay.click(function(){
$overlay.hide()

});

I'm just very curious to how it does this?

Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,909 Points
Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,909 Points

I often wonder the same thing myself, but I just wanted to warn you of a little syntax error near the top. You forgot to add the > to the closing </div> tag stored in var $overlay. It should look like this:

var $overlay = $('<div id="overlay"></div>');

1 Answer

Stephen Goeddel
Stephen Goeddel
11,239 Points
Stephen Goeddel
Stephen Goeddel
11,239 Points

$caption, at that point, is just a DOM element like anything else you would have in your HTML. If your HTML looked like this: 

<body>
    <div></div>
</body>

you could use jQuery to add text to you div like so:

$('div').text("new text here");

you are doing the same thing in your example, the only difference is you aren't adding the caption <p> directly into the HTML file, instead you are inserting it into the DOM with jQuery and then modifying the text.