Take the 2-minute tour ×  In the following jQuery, the .each()
method takes two arguments: 'ul li a' and menu. What do these
two arguments mean?  var menu = $('.menu'); $('ul li a',
menu).each(function() {     $(this).append('<span />');   <div
class="menu">         <li><a href="#">Edit Profile</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Account Settings</a></li>         <li><a
href="#">Appear Offline</a></li>         <li><a
href="#">Logout</a></li> share|improve this question add comment
2 Answers  up vote 6 down vote accepted  The second parameter to
the jQuery function is the context. This tells jQuery to only
search for elements that are in that context  So for your
example:   This will only search for anchors within li's within
a ul, that are also located inside of menu.  This can be a very
useful optimization since it can significantly cut down the
amount of space jQuery has to search.   To possibly make this a
bit clearer (as jfriend00 points out), your particular example,
$('ul li a', menu), is equivalent to $(