help with jquery array and links

[CyberShot]

I am using jquery to make my own navigation for some pagination. I know how to do it this way

 

I have a list

 

  <ul class="pages">

   </ul>

<ul class="pages">

   </ul>

<ul class="pages">

   </ul>

<ul class="pages">

   </ul>

 

So that is 4 ul's with the class of pages. So I can use jquery to pick that up in an array by doing

 

$(".pages:eq(0)").show();

 

that would show the first ul, I could hide all other pages by doing $(".pages").hide();

 

simple enough.

 

Now I want to make a link for the pagination, so I do this

 

<a href="#" class="pageLink">1</a> <a href="#" class="pageLink">2</a> <a href="#" class="pageLink">3</a> <a href="#" class="pageLink">4</a>

 

and I wrote a click event for it like so

 

$(".pageLInk:eq(1)").click(function(){
{
      $(".pages").hide();
      $(".pages:eq(1)").show();
}

That's about as simple a pagination script I can get. I don't think it gets simpler than this. Here is my issue. I want to make it a little more complicated but can't figure out how. I wanted to put the pages into a variable so I wouldn't have to type it out all the time like this

var page1 = $(".pages:eq(0)");
var page2 = $(".pages:eq(1)");

 

OR

 

var page1 = $(".pages:eq(0)",".pages:eq(1)");

 

This is what I thought it would be, but of course I was wrong. Can you tell me how to fix this?

[trq]

var page1 = $(".pages:eq(0)");
var page2 = $(".pages:eq(1)");

 

Should work fine. What is the problem?

[CyberShot]

I don't know what the problem is yet, I am still working on it. It works fine if I just do

 

$("pages:eq(0)").show();

 

but when I change it to

 

var page1 = $(".pages:eq(0)");

 

$("page1").show();

 

the page disapears

[CyberShot]

ok, I figured it out, I had to get rid of the " marks

 

$(page1).show();

 

instead of $("page1").show();

[trq]

page1.show();

 

should suffice.