jQuery Traversing - Ancestors
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()
jQuery parent() Method
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:
jQuery parents() Method
The parents() method returns all ancestor elements of the selected element,
all the way up to the document's root element (<html>).
The following example returns all ancestors of all
<span> elements:
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:
jQuery parentsUntil() Method
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:
jQuery Exercises
jQuery Traversing Reference
For a complete overview of all jQuery Traversing methods, please go to our jQuery Traversing Reference.
