How can I refresh a stored and snapshotted jquery selector variable

Yeah, it’s a snapshot. Furthermore, removing an element from the page DOM tree isn’t magically going to vanish all references to the element.

You can refresh it like so:

var a = $(".elem");

a = $(a.selector);

Mini-plugin:

$.fn.refresh = function() {
    return $(this.selector);
};

var a = $(".elem");

a = a.refresh();

This simple solution doesn’t work with complex traversals though. You are going to have to make a parser for the .selector property to refresh the snapshot for those.

The format is like:

$("body").find("div").next(".sibling").prevAll().siblings().selector
//"body div.next(.sibling).prevAll().siblings()"

In-place mini-plugin:

$.fn.refresh = function() {
    var elems = $(this.selector);
    this.splice(0, this.length);
    this.push.apply( this, elems );
    return this;
};

var a = $(".elem");
a.refresh() //No assignment necessary