Find closest previous element jQuery

Question

I am wanting something similar to this person  except the element I want to match might not be a direct sibling   If I had this HTML  for example    lt h3 gt       lt span gt           lt b gt Whaddup  lt  b gt       lt  span gt   lt  h3 gt   lt h3 gt       lt span gt           lt b gt Hello lt  b gt       lt  span gt   lt  h3 gt   lt div gt       lt div gt           lt img   gt       lt  div gt        lt span id  me  gt  lt  span gt   lt  div gt   lt h3 gt       lt span gt           lt b gt Goodbye lt  b gt       lt  span gt   lt  h3 gt    I would want to be able to do something like this   var link       me   closestPreviousElement  h3 span b    console log link text        Hello    Is there an easy way to do this in jQuery   EDIT  I should have made my specification a little bit clearer      me   may or may not have a parent div  The code should not assume that it does  I don t necessarily know anything about the surrounding elements

User · Accepted Answer

var link       me   closest   has h3 span b    find  h3 span b      Example  http   jsfiddle net e27r8   This uses the closest   docs  method to get the first ancestor that has a nested h3 span b  then does a  find     Of course you could have multiple matches     Otherwise  you re looking at doing a more direct traversal   var link       me   closest  h3   div   prev   find  span b      edit  This one works with your updated HTML   Example  http   jsfiddle net e27r8 2     EDIT  Updated to deal with updated question   var link       me   closest  h3       prev   find  span b      This makes the targeted element for  closest   generic  so that even if there is no parent  it will still work   Example  http   jsfiddle net e27r8 4

User · Answer

see http   api jquery com prev   var link       me   parent  div   prev  h3   find  b    alert link text       see http   jsfiddle net gBwLq

User · Answer

I know this is old  but was hunting for the same thing and ended up coming up with another solution which is fairly concise andsimple   Here s my way of finding the next or previous element  taking into account traversal over elements that aren t of the type we re looking for   var ClosestPrev      StartObject   prevAll    selectorClass    first    var ClosestNext      StartObject   nextAll    selectorClass    first      I m not 100  sure of the order that the collection from the nextAll prevAll functions return  but in my test case  it appears that the array is in the direction expected   Might be helpful if someone could clarify the internals of jquery for that for a strong guarantee of reliability

User · Answer

No  there is no  easy  way   Your best bet would be to do a loop where you first check each previous sibling  then move to the parent node and all of its previous siblings   You ll need to break the selector into two  1 to check if the current node could be the top level node in your selector  and 1 to check if it s descendants match   Edit  This might as well be a plugin   You can use this with any selector in any HTML    function            fn closestPrior   function selector            selector   selector replace    s   s   g               var combinator   selector search       gt                var parent   selector substr 0  combinator           var children   selector substr combinator           var el   this          var match                while  el length  amp  amp   match length                el   el prev                if   el length                    var par   el parent                       Don t use the parent - you ve already checked all of the previous                     elements in this parent  move to its previous sibling  if any                  while  par length  amp  amp   par prev   length                        par   par parent                                      el   par prev                    if   el length                        break                                              if  el is parent   amp  amp  el find children  length                    match   el find children  last                              else if  el find selector  length                    match   el find selector  last                                    return match           jQuery

User · Answer

var link       me   closest   has h3 span b    find  span b   text

[jquery] Find closest previous element jQuery

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