return the inserted element

i'm pretty new to jquery. I'm trying to insert an element to the DOM, and get that element back in my script.

Ex:

    var elem = $("body").append("");
    $(elem).show();

but it seems that .append returns the whole jQuery object.. am i supposed to use an ID for the inserted element and always reference it by it?? i really hope that there is a 开发者_JAVA技巧smarter move here. I'm used to do it like that from Prototype..

Let's suppose you want to create a div:

var elem = $("div").appendTo("body").html('some html for the div').hide();
$(elem).show();

The above code create the div, sets some html for it using html() and hides it initially on because later you want to show it.

Note: Note that I have written different methods/functions on the same line, this is known as chaining in JQuery and yes very useful.

The append() method does nothing that the $() method couldn't do when it comes to element creation. The only difference is that append() adds it to the DOM.

Thus

$("body").append(XXXXX);

is no different to

var elem = $(XXXXX);
$("body").append(elem);