jQuery counting elements by class – what is the best way to implement this?

Should just be something like:

// Gets the number of elements with class yourClass
var numItems = $('.yourclass').length

---

As a side-note, it is often beneficial to check the length property before chaining a lot of functions calls on a jQuery object, to ensure that we actually have some work to perform. See below:

var $items = $('.myclass');
// Ensure we have at least one element in $items before setting up animations
// and other resource intensive tasks.
if($items.length)
{
  $items.animate(/* */)
    // It might also be appropriate to check that we have 2 or more
    // elements returned by the filter-call before animating this subset of 
    // items.
    .filter(':odd')
      .animate(/* */)
      .end()
    .promise()
    .then(function () { 
       $items.addClass('all-done');
    });
}