I was refactoring some code this morning for a plugin I’m writing and ran into a case where I needed to dynamically execute a jQuery method. I had a variable that holds the value of a jQuery function I wanted to execute based on which key code was pressed; prev() for the up arrow, and next() for the down arrow. As it turns out you can do this with array notation.

These two examples accomplish the same thing:

// HTML:  <p><a href="">Click me</a></p>
 
// vanilla jQuery
$('p').find('a').click(function(e){
	alert('hello!');
	e.preventDefault();
});
 
// dynamically calling a method
var theMethod = 'find';
$('p')[theMethod]('a')['click'](function(e){
	alert('hello!');
	e.preventDefault();
});

Good to know.