Count <li> s in <ul> with jQuery

Question

I have a simple list:

<ul id="cyclelist"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> <li>Item 3</li> </ul> 

and I use jQuery to cycle through the list. The first problem is finding if the list has more than one item to start with. I expect this to work:

 var $list = $('#cyclelist'); if ($list.length > 1) { ... } 

But length always returns 1. Is there a better way to find the length of a list using jQuery? Or I'm wrong?

Answer 1

Try $('#cyclelist li').length

The problem is that $ ('# cyclelist') has only one element - the unordered list as a whole. If you want to know the number of list items in your unordered list, you can simply add an additional “li” selector.

Answer 2

 var $list = $('#cyclelist li'); alert($list.length); 

Simply put: you got the number of ULs matching this selector.

Answer 3

Your selector selects a dom element with the id "list of loops", which is a single element (ul with this id). What you would like to do is select the li elements attached to this ul. For this you can do (as indicated)

  $ ('# cyclelist li')

Answer 4

 $('#cyclelist') 

uses a CSS selector for an element with id = "list of loops" and, therefore, returns a link to a single element / object to correctly; -)

I think you probably meant

 $('#cyclelist li') 

to return list items to a named item.

Another jQuery-esque way to iterate over item collections is to use each, cf http://docs.jquery.com/Core/each