creating a plugin return this question

it says in the documentation to allways return the this object in all cases i've seen so far you return this.each() function. So are there anyother cases other than this开发者_JS百科.each that you would return

If you are trying to add a method similar to .prev() or another such function included in jQuery, using this.map() may be useful. To answer another question on this site, I created a jQuery plugin that does exactly that.

Likewise, one might want to return a string (or other data type) from a plugin (compare .attr(), .css(), and .data()), most often from the first wrapped element when only one argument is passed to the method.

For most plugins, the main reasons to return this.each(function() { ... }) are:

• Your code is executed for every DOM element referred to within the jQuery object.
• It returns that same jQuery object to allow method chaining. Obviously, that doesn't apply for methods intended to return a new jQuery object, such as mine.