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Discussion on: Use $ & $$ Instead of document.querySelector/All in JavaScript without jQuery

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Andrea Giammarchi

Chrome has its own Console Utilities API Reference where $ and $$ are offered regardless, among other utils, unless the global scope has been overwritten with something else (i.e. jQuery).

The API for $ and $$ is more jQuery-ish, and if you'd like to reproduce it its like:

const $ = (css, parent = document) => parent.querySelector(css);
const $$ = (css, parent = document) => parent.querySelectorAll(css);

To avoid needing polyfills for forEach or Symbol.iterator on NodeList collections, you can also go ahead and convert the static collection as Array so that all methods, including filter and map can be used.

const $$ = (css, parent = document) =>
  Array.from(parent.querySelectorAll(css));

If you don't have Array.from in your debug session, or you are after a thin layer that works across browsers, you can go for the following:

function $(css, parent) {
  return (parent || document).querySelector(css);
}

function $$(css, parent) {
  var nodes = (parent || document).querySelectorAll(css);
  return Array.prototype.slice.call(nodes, 0);
}