jQuery Traversing - Ancestors
An ancestor is a parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on.
With jQuery you can traverse up the DOM tree to find ancestors of an element.
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:
Test Yourself with Exercises!
Exercise 1 » Exercise 2 » Exercise 3 » Exercise 4 »
jQuery Traversing Reference
For a complete overview of all jQuery Traversing methods, please go to our jQuery Traversing Reference.
