>>> $$(selector)

January 30th, 2009. Tagged: CSS, firebug, JavaScript

Gotta love the Firebug console, how can anyone not love the Firebug console. It makes testing random pieces of JavaScript a breeze and best of all - you're playing with the live page. Your page or any page for that matter.

Two nice shortcuts you can use in the console are $ and $$.

The first is like document.getElementById() and the second allows you to get elements by using a selector, like w3c's document.querySelectorAll(), now available in the latest browser versions, including IE8.

So go ahead, give $$ a try. For example you can visit yahoo.com, open up the console and try:
>>> $$('.first')
or
>>> $$('.patabs .first')
or
>>> $$('#tabs1 li')

Lots of fun!

So here's a little example application I came up with, it spits out unused selectors from your CSS. Just paste it in the multi-line console.

for(var i = 0; i < document.styleSheets.length; i++) {
  for (var j = 0; j < document.styleSheets[i].cssRules.length; j++) {
    s = document.styleSheets[i].cssRules[j].selectorText; 
    if ($$(s).length === 0) console.log(s);
  }
}

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