Best way to remove an event handler in jQuery?

jQuery ≥ 1.7

With jQuery 1.7 onward the event API has been updated, .bind()/.unbind() are still available for backwards compatibility, but the preferred method is using the on()/off() functions. The below would now be,

$('#myimage').click(function() { return false; }); // Adds another click event
$('#myimage').off('click');
$('#myimage').on('click.mynamespace', function() { /* Do stuff */ });
$('#myimage').off('click.mynamespace');

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jQuery < 1.7

In your example code you are simply adding another click event to the image, not overriding the previous one:

$('#myimage').click(function() { return false; }); // Adds another click event

Both click events will then get fired.

As people have said you can use unbind to remove all click events:

$('#myimage').unbind('click');

If you want to add a single event and then remove it (without removing any others that might have been added) then you can use event namespacing:

$('#myimage').bind('click.mynamespace', function() { /* Do stuff */ });

and to remove just your event:

$('#myimage').unbind('click.mynamespace');

This wasn't available when this question was answered, but you can also use the live() method to enable/disable events.

$('#myimage:not(.disabled)').live('click', myclickevent);

$('#mydisablebutton').click( function () { $('#myimage').addClass('disabled'); });

What will happen with this code is that when you click #mydisablebutton, it will add the class disabled to the #myimage element. This will make it so that the selector no longer matches the element and the event will not be fired until the 'disabled' class is removed making the .live() selector valid again.

This has other benefits by adding styling based on that class as well.

This can be done by using the unbind function.

$('#myimage').unbind('click');

You can add multiple event handlers to the same object and event in jquery. This means adding a new one doesn't replace the old ones.

There are several strategies for changing event handlers, such as event namespaces. There are some pages about this in the online docs.

Look at this question (that's how I learned of unbind). There is some useful description of these strategies in the answers.

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