jQuery equivalent of querySelector

Question

What is the jQuery equivalent of querySelector? The only way I've found so far is to select all then pick the first selection:

$(selectorString)[0]

With the above expression, is jQuery smart enough to stop after finding the first match?

Update: @Mutnowski suggested using eq() and first, but after reading the jQuery documentation those two methods seem to have the same drawback: jQuery will first get all matches, then only filter out the first element.

Answer 1

You want .eq(index) to get an index

$("td").eq(2)
$("td:eq(2)")

http://api.jquery.com/eq/

If you want just the first use .first()

$("tr").first()
$("tr:first")

http://api.jquery.com/first/