jQuery .after()

The .after() and .insertAfter() methods perform the same task. The major difference is in the syntax—specifically, in the placement of the content and target. With .after(), the content to be inserted comes from the method’s argument: $(target).after(contentToBeInserted). With .insertAfter(), on the other hand, the content precedes the method and is inserted after the target, which in turn is passed as the .insertAfter() method’s argument: $(contentToBeInserted).insertAfter(target).

Using the following HTML:

<div class="container">
 <h2>Greetings</h2>
 <div class="inner">Hello</div>
 <div class="inner">Goodbye</div>
</div>

Content can be created and then inserted after several elements at once:

$( ".inner" ).after( "<p>Test</p>" );

Each inner <div> element gets this new content:

<div class="container">
 <h2>Greetings</h2>
 <div class="inner">Hello</div>
 <p>Test</p>
 <div class="inner">Goodbye</div>
 <p>Test</p>
</div>

An element in the DOM can also be selected and inserted after another element:

$( ".container" ).after( $( "h2" ) );

If an element selected this way is inserted into a single location elsewhere in the DOM, it will be moved rather than cloned:

<div class="container">
 <div class="inner">Hello</div>
 <div class="inner">Goodbye</div>
</div>
<h2>Greetings</h2>

Important: If there is more than one target element, however, cloned copies of the inserted element will be created for each target except for the last one.

Passing a Function

As of jQuery 1.4, .after() supports passing a function that returns the elements to insert.

$( "p" ).after(function() {
 return "<div>" + this.className + "</div>";
});

This example inserts a <div> after each paragraph, with each new <div> containing the class name(s) of its preceding paragraph.

Additional Arguments

Similar to other content-adding methods such as .prepend() and .before(), .after() also supports passing in multiple arguments as input. Supported input includes DOM elements, jQuery objects, HTML strings, and arrays of DOM elements.

For example, the following will insert two new <div>s and an existing <div> after the first paragraph:

var $newdiv1 = $( "<div id='object1'/>" ),
 newdiv2 = document.createElement( "div" ),
 existingdiv1 = document.getElementById( "foo" );
 
$( "p" ).first().after( $newdiv1, [ newdiv2, existingdiv1 ] );

Since .after() can accept any number of additional arguments, the same result can be achieved by passing in the three <div>s as three separate arguments, like so: $( "p" ).first().after( $newdiv1, newdiv2, existingdiv1 ). The type and number of arguments will largely depend on the elements that are collected in the code.