Naming A Formerly Anonymous Function Breaks

Why does this not work: $(document).on('click','a',myFunction); var myFunction = function() { debugger; } When this does: $(document).on('click','a',function() { debugger; }

Solution 1:

You have to swap the lines:

var myFunction = function() {
   debugger;
}
$(document).on('click','a', myFunction);

Otherwise, you would be assigning undefined as the event handler, as the variable myFunction doesn't have a value yet when you were passing it to .on.

Also: assigning a function to a variable like that doesn't make it named, it's still an anonymous function, just stored in a variable. A named function would be:

var myFunction = functionsomeName() {
    debugger;
}

See Named function expressions demystified for more details.

Solution 2:

Instead of saying:

var myFunction = function() {
   debugger;
}

you need to say:

functionmyFunction() {
   debugger;
}

This will declare the function on the first pass so that it can be referenced during program execution.