With jQuery you can traverse up the DOM tree to find ancestors of an element.
An ancestor is a parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on.
Traversing Up the DOM Tree
Three useful jQuery methods for traversing up the DOM tree are:
parent()
parents()
parentsUntil()
The parent()
method returns the direct parent element of the selected element.
This method only traverse a single level up the DOM tree.
The following example returns the direct parent element of each <span>
elements:
$(document).ready(function(){
$("span").parent();
});
The parents()
method returns all ancestor elements of the selected element,
all the way up to the document's root element (<html>
).
You can also use an optional parameter to filter the search for ancestors.
The following example returns all ancestors of all <span>
elements that are <ul>
elements:
$(document).ready(function(){
$("span").parents("ul");
});
The parentsUntil()
method returns all ancestor elements between two given
arguments.
The following example returns all ancestor elements
between a <span>
and a <div>
element:
$(document).ready(function(){
$("span").parentsUntil("div");
});