Calling $('#select').empty() should set options length to 0

[anonymous]

Hi,

Consider the following HTML snippet:

<select name="s" id="s">
  <option value=""> </option>
</select>

Consider the following JavaScript snippet:

  var ohtml = '';

  ohtml += ('<option value="1">1</option>');
  ohtml += ('<option value="2">2</option>');
  ohtml += ('<option value="3">3</option>');
  
  ${'#s'}.empty().append( ohtml );

In certain conditions, this code fails in various version of IE:

​http://stackoverflow.com/a/2040837/59087

Fix IE8 refresh bug (the values get set in the DOM, but the view for the drop-down does not refresh:

  ${'#s'}[0].options.length = 0;

Ideally, the jQuery empty() function would include code to set the length to 0. This would have saved some of my hair follicles.

[anonymous]

See also:

​http://jsperf.com/find-remove-vs-empty

[dmethvin]

I think we'd be able to fix the oldIE bug with emptying select boxes, but only if the immediate element being emptied was a select.

The benchmark there ignores the problem of removing events and data from any options, which means in real-life situations it would leak memory. So you can't take that shortcut. In fact, we'd need to do all our standard cleanup and only then set the length to zero if it was a select.

[Dave Methvin]

Fix #12336. Ensure oldIE really does .empty() selects.

Changeset: bbdf957e9886212cac9b72ee9dedd73118aa8427