Javascript – Add a blank row in HTML Table

For HTML 4, the answer is technically:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

HTML 5 is even more permissive, saying only that an id must contain at least one character and may not contain any space characters.

The id attribute is case sensitive in XHTML.

As a purely practical matter, you may want to avoid certain characters. Periods, colons and '#' have special meaning in CSS selectors, so you will have to escape those characters using a backslash in CSS or a double backslash in a selector string passed to jQuery. Think about how often you will have to escape a character in your stylesheets or code before you go crazy with periods and colons in ids.

For example, the HTML declaration <div id="first.name"></div> is valid. You can select that element in CSS as #first\.name and in jQuery like so: $('#first\\.name'). But if you forget the backslash, $('#first.name'), you will have a perfectly valid selector looking for an element with id first and also having class name. This is a bug that is easy to overlook. You might be happier in the long run choosing the id first-name (a hyphen rather than a period), instead.

You can simplify your development tasks by strictly sticking to a naming convention. For example, if you limit yourself entirely to lower-case characters and always separate words with either hyphens or underscores (but not both, pick one and never use the other), then you have an easy-to-remember pattern. You will never wonder "was it firstName or FirstName?" because you will always know that you should type first_name. Prefer camel case? Then limit yourself to that, no hyphens or underscores, and always, consistently use either upper-case or lower-case for the first character, don't mix them.

A now very obscure problem was that at least one browser, Netscape 6, incorrectly treated id attribute values as case-sensitive. That meant that if you had typed id="firstName" in your HTML (lower-case 'f') and #FirstName { color: red } in your CSS (upper-case 'F'), that buggy browser would have failed to set the element's color to red. At the time of this edit, April 2015, I hope you aren't being asked to support Netscape 6. Consider this a historical footnote.

The approach you suggest is not guaranteed to give you the result you're looking for - what if you had a tbody for example:

<table id="myTable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>...</tr>
    <tr>...</tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

You would end up with the following:

<table id="myTable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>...</tr>
    <tr>...</tr>
  </tbody>
  <tr>...</tr>
</table>

I would therefore recommend this approach instead:

$('#myTable tr:last').after('<tr>...</tr><tr>...</tr>');

You can include anything within the after() method as long as it's valid HTML, including multiple rows as per the example above.

Update: Revisiting this answer following recent activity with this question. eyelidlessness makes a good comment that there will always be a tbody in the DOM; this is true, but only if there is at least one row. If you have no rows, there will be no tbody unless you have specified one yourself.

DaRKoN_ suggests appending to the tbody rather than adding content after the last tr. This gets around the issue of having no rows, but still isn't bulletproof as you could theoretically have multiple tbody elements and the row would get added to each of them.

Weighing everything up, I'm not sure there is a single one-line solution that accounts for every single possible scenario. You will need to make sure the jQuery code tallies with your markup.

I think the safest solution is probably to ensure your table always includes at least one tbody in your markup, even if it has no rows. On this basis, you can use the following which will work however many rows you have (and also account for multiple tbody elements):

$('#myTable > tbody:last-child').append('<tr>...</tr><tr>...</tr>');