jQuery Forum

Usecases?

Generally when you only want to clone some attributes but not data, events, etc.

Whenever you'd want to make a widget or something which turns an element into some more advanced UI, you'd like to not lose the attrs (id, class, title, etc.) which the user passed - but using $( elem ).clone() doesn't make sense...

A somewhat common problem: clearing a changed input:file - there's (that I know of) no way of doing it except to replace the input with a new one... you wouldn't want the attributes to get lost in the process - and $.clone might not be an alternative.

The enhancement would allow for simplified logic such as:
input.attr( textWrapper, 'title' + (type in { 'select': 1, 'radio': 1, 'checkbox': 1 } ? 'tabindex accesskey' : '') )
saving a lot of code-weight for conditionality-checking, etc.

Furthermore I think it's a good general practice for an "object" to copy from some object of same instance.

Also: I incorrectly wrote "value = list;" - it should be: "name = list;" and all references to "from" should be changed to "name"...

Updated version:

1.     attr: function( name, value, copyFilter ) {
2.         if ( name instanceof jQuery || name.nodeName && (name = $( name )) ) {
3.             var list = {};
4.             jQuery.each( value.split( ' ' ), function( val, key ) {
5.                 list[key] = (val = name.attr( key )) && copyFilter && copyFilter[key] ? (val = copyFilter[key].call( val, key, val )) : val;
6.             });
7.             name = list;
8.         }
9.         return jQuery.access( this, name, value, true, jQuery.attr );
10.     },