DOM queries that always return an array.

Introduction

Modern browsers enable us to perform DOM queries natively, e.g:

let cookies = document.querySelectorAll(".cookie");

But we all want to loop over the returned elements. So in practice, we’ve got to do a little more work, particularly converting the resulting NodeList to an array, e.g:

let cookies;
try {
  let query = document.querySelectorAll(".cookie");
  cookies = Array.prototype.slice.call(query);
} catch (err) {
  console.error(err.message);
}

cookies.forEach(cookie => {
  // ...
});

Tealight provides a familiar API to perform native queries, without the extra work.

tealight(".cookie").forEach(cookie => {
  // ...
});

Installation

Browser

A simple and fast way to get started is to include this script on your page:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/tealight"></script>

This will create the global variable tealight.

Module

$ npm install tealight

CommonJS

const tealight = require("tealight");

ES2015

import tealight from "tealight";

Usage

tealight accepts a single argument target and will always return an array of 0 or more DOM nodes.

For the examples below, we will query against this HTML fragment:

<div id="jar">
  <div class="chocolate-chip cookie"></div>
  <div class="peanut-butter cookie"></div>
  <div class="short-bread cookie"></div>
</div>

tealight(target: string): Array<HTMLElement>

string targets will be used as CSS selectors.

tealight("#jar");
// => [ <div#jar> ]

tealight(".cookie");
// => [ <div.chocolate-chip.cookie>, <div.peanut-butter.cookie>, <div.short-bread.cookie> ]

tealight(target: HTMLElement): Array<HTMLElement>

HTMLElement targets will simply be wrapped in an Array

const node = document.querySelector("#jar");

tealight(node);
// => [ <div#jar> ]

tealight(target: HTMLCollection) : Array<HTMLElement>

HTMLCollection arguments will be converted to Array.

const nodeList = document.querySelectorAll(".cookie");

tealight(nodeList);
// => [ <div.chocolate-chip.cookie>, <div.peanut-butter.cookie>, <div.short-bread.cookie> ]

tealight(target: Array<any>): Array<HTMLElement>

Array targets will be filtered, leaving only HTMLElement

let node = document.querySelector("#jar");
let array = [node, null, ".cookie"];

tealight(array);
// => [ <div#jar> ]

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Copyright 2020 Julian Lloyd
Open source under the MIT License.