Determining the Element Clicked on in jQuery

In jQuery, you can easily find out when an element itself is clicked on, but binding with the click event, like so...

$('#MyElement').click(function(event) {
console.log("I just clicked the element with the id of Myelement!");
});

But in more complicated scenarios, several elements will trigger a shared function, and you need to know which element was clicked from that shared function.

That would be like this...

$('#MyElement').click(function(event) { return doSomething(event);}
$('#MyOtherElement').click(function(event) { return doSomething(event);}

In this case, you could find out which element was clicked by using the event object...

function doSomething(event) {
console.log("Just clicked the element with an id of..." + event.target.id);
}

The event.target object will tell you almost everything you need to know about what was clicked.