move event handler with jQuery

I have an issue which is driving me crazy and as a last resort I am placing a question here.

I want to move the onclick event from an element to the onfocus event of the same element and I am using the following code:

$("#theElement").bind("focus", {}, $("#theElement").data("events").click);
$("#theElement").unbind("click");

Maybe you have guess it. IT DOES NOT WORK.

How do I make this work? I am getting a "fn.apply is not a function" message in the following piece of code from jquery 1.3.2:

proxy: function( fn, proxy ){
        proxy = proxy || function(){ return fn.apply(this, arguments); };
        // Set the guid of unique handler to the same of original handler, so it can be removed
        proxy.guid = fn.guid = fn.guid || proxy.guid || this.guid++;
        // So proxy can be declared as an argum开发者_开发百科ent
        return proxy;
    }

EDIT: I'm sorry, I should have mentioned. This comes from a plugin which does some stuff when clicking an element. I want to make the same thing when the element gets focus not when it is cliked so the simplest solution I thought off was this since I can't modify the code for the plugin.

EDIT: Found the problem. It is similar to what @sje397 posted in his answer, not

$('#theElement').data('events').click[0]

but

$('#theElement').data('events').click[3]

For some reason, even if only one event is registered the thing ends up as 3 (the guid in that piece of code from jquery).

I would suggest naming the event handler in the first place, like

$('#theElement').click(function myHandler() {
  //...
});

Then, you can do

$("#theElement").bind("focus", {}, myHandler);
$("#theElement").unbind("click");

This should make it more readable, as well as fixing the bug.

If you can't, then you can do:

// assuming yours is the first handler
var myHandler = $('#theElement').data('events').click[0]; 

$("#theElement").bind("focus", {}, myHandler);
$("#theElement").unbind("click");

Also not that in jQuery 1.4.3+, the key was changed to __events__. See this answer.

I found out that jQuery adds the event to an element by using .data(), so you could do something like this to retrieve the event handler:

$(el).data().events.click[0].handler

This is not an elegant solution, but if you cannot change anything to the click handler itself, this would be the only solution.

I'm not 100% clear what it is exactly that you want to do. Do you want to bind a focus AND a click event to the same element?

$("#theElement").bind("focus click", function(){
    //do stuff
    $(this).unbind('focus click');
});

edit: given your clarification - you want to fake the 'click' event on focus...

$("#theElement").bind("focus", function(){
    $(this).trigger('click');
});

http://api.jquery.com/trigger/