Jquery: tricky selector question

jquerynestedselector

hi i'm having this markup:

<div id="main">
     <div nam="item">1</div>
     <div nam="item">2</div>

     <div>
           <div nam="item">3</div>
           <div nam="item">4</div>
           <div nam="item">5</div>
     </div>

     <div nam="item">6</div>
     <div nam="item">7</div>
</div>

i'm now selecting only the direct child divs by using this method:

var divs = $("#main > [nam]"

my question – i want to do this inside a function where i only pass the parent div, how would i need to change the selector?

function get_rootChildren(div)
{
      return($("* > [nam]",div));
}

^ this is bogus but i think u know what i mean – how could this be done?
thx, fuxi

Best Solution

Perhaps:

$("#main > div.item")

From jQuery Selector Docs

parent > child

Matches all child elements specified by "child" of elements specified by "parent".

To answer part two - I would use .children() something like this:

function get_rootChildren(div) {
   $(div).children('div.item');
}

Related Solutions

Javascript – n “exists” function for jQuery

In JavaScript, everything is 'truthy' or 'falsy', and for numbers 0 means false, everything else true. So you could write:

if ($(selector).length)

You don't need that >0 part.

Javascript – Add table row in jQuery

The approach you suggest is not guaranteed to give you the result you're looking for - what if you had a tbody for example:

<table id="myTable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>...</tr>
    <tr>...</tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

You would end up with the following:

<table id="myTable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>...</tr>
    <tr>...</tr>
  </tbody>
  <tr>...</tr>
</table>

I would therefore recommend this approach instead:

$('#myTable tr:last').after('<tr>...</tr><tr>...</tr>');

You can include anything within the after() method as long as it's valid HTML, including multiple rows as per the example above.

Update: Revisiting this answer following recent activity with this question. eyelidlessness makes a good comment that there will always be a tbody in the DOM; this is true, but only if there is at least one row. If you have no rows, there will be no tbody unless you have specified one yourself.

DaRKoN_ suggests appending to the tbody rather than adding content after the last tr. This gets around the issue of having no rows, but still isn't bulletproof as you could theoretically have multiple tbody elements and the row would get added to each of them.

Weighing everything up, I'm not sure there is a single one-line solution that accounts for every single possible scenario. You will need to make sure the jQuery code tallies with your markup.

I think the safest solution is probably to ensure your table always includes at least one tbody in your markup, even if it has no rows. On this basis, you can use the following which will work however many rows you have (and also account for multiple tbody elements):

$('#myTable > tbody:last-child').append('<tr>...</tr><tr>...</tr>');

Jquery: tricky selector question

Best Solution

`parent > child`

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