dont fetch the count in loops repeatedly!

This should have been really obvious, but I haven’t really thought about what happens when you do

for(var i =0; i < total(); i++)

with respect to the function total(), which gets called over and over again. If that function has to search through a large document, and total is large, then this could be really inneficient and slow. The right way (obviously) to do this is to assign total() into a variable first, so the code becomes:

var total = total(); 
for (var i=0; i< total; i++) {...}

Here is an example that prints “checking count” 5 times:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.4.2.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      function count() {
        $("#log").append("checking count<br>");
        return 5;
      }
      $(function() {
        for (var i=0; i < count(); i++) {
          //do something
        }
      });
    </script>