Get exact selector in jQuery / alternative to .selector

Question

I wish I could write something like this

$("div.banana .for aside.scale").yellowify();

$.fn.yellowify = function () {
    this.css("color","yellow");
    alert($(this).selector);
});

which would alert

div.banana .for aside.scale

The question is very similar to this one, however, there the poster wants to retrieve a DOM structure by scanning parents of the selector or something like that. I simply want the selector as is, without any additional classes or IDs. I want it exactly as it's there in the first line.

jQuery used to have this .selector property, but it has been deprecated in 1.7 and removed in 1.9 (or has it? - thanks Ted. UPDATE .selector will only be removed in jQuery 3.0!). The docs state:

Plugins that need to use a selector string within their plugin can require it as a parameter of the method. For example, a "foo" plugin could be written as $.fn.foo = function( selector, options ) { /* plugin code goes here */ };, and the person using the plugin would write $( "div.bar" ).foo( "div.bar", {dog: "bark"} ); with the "div.bar" selector repeated as the first argument of .foo().

But I think that that's incredibly ugly and not user-friendly at all. Is there an alternative possible that doesn't require any action on the user's side? I.e. without needing any additional arguments?

---

For those who are curious, ideally I want my plugin to be able to echo styles for the specific element, something like this, but obviously much more complicated:

$.fn.yellowify = function () {
    var css = $(this).selector + "{color: yellow;}";
    // I can add rules for specific elements now as well
    css += $(this).selector + " .child {color: red;}";
    $("<style>").html(css).appendTo("head");
});

Together with arguments, this allows me to have a far reach with my plugin.

Answer 1

In your example your use case is a static plugin example not a prototype plugin example. Using $.fn.myPlugin your asking the user of your plugin to manipulate it as it it was part of the jQuery API. In that case the plugin is designed to iterate over the jQuery object at that point in the call chain ($(this).each()).

However your example looks lke it acts on the actual jQuery object itself not on selected elements adn would be better served as a plugin on the jQuery class object:

$.yellowify = function (selector) {
  var css = selector + "{color: yellow;}";
  // I can add rules for specific elements now as well
  css += selector + " .child {color: red;}";
  $("<style>").html(css).appendTo("head");
});

It isn't entirely clear why you feel you want to do this. It's strange an alien. However, for completness plugins that act on the jQuery prototype chain need to loop over the already selected elements and return the original collection. If you need to look for elements within the selection then you would use .find().