Complex CSS selector for parent of active child

Question

Is there a way to select a parent element based on the class of a child element in the class   The example that is relevant to me relating to HTML output by a nice menu plugin for http   drupal org   The output renders like this      lt ul class  menu  gt         lt li gt             lt a class  active  gt Active Page lt  a gt         lt  li gt         lt li gt               lt a gt Some Other Page lt  a gt         lt  li gt     lt  ul gt      My question is whether or not it is possible to apply a style to the list item that contains the anchor with the active class on it   Obviously  I d prefer that the list item be marked as active  but I don t have control of the code that gets produced   I could perform this sort of thing using javascript  JQuery springs to mind   but I was wondering if there is a way to do this using CSS selectors   Just to be clear  I want to apply a style to the list item  not the anchor

User · Answer

THE    PARENT    SELECTOR Right now  there is no option to select the parent of an element in CSS  not even CSS3   But with CSS4  the most important news in the current W3C draft is the support for the parent selector   ul li hover      background   fff     Using the above  when hovering an list element  the whole unordered list will be highlighted by adding a white background to it  Official documentation  https   www w3 org TR 2011 WD-selectors4-20110929  overview  last row

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I actually ran into the same issue as the original poster   There is a simple solution of just using  parent   jQuery selector   My problem was  I was using  parent instead of  parent    Stupid mistake I know   Bind the events  in this case since my tabs are in Modal I needed to bind them with  live instead of a basic  click       testTab1  tabLink   live  click   function             modal ul tabs li   removeClass  current      Remove any  current  class       this  parent   addClass  current      Add  current  class to selected tab         modal div testTab1  tabContent   hide          this  next   tabContent   fadeIn           return false         testTab2  tabLink   live  click   function             modal ul tabs li   removeClass  current      Remove any  current  class       this  parent   addClass  current      Add  current  class to selected tab         modal div testTab2  tabContent   hide          this  next   tabContent   fadeIn           return false       Here is the HTML     lt div id  tabView1  style  display none   gt     lt  -- start  the code for tabView 1 -- gt     lt div id  testTab1  style  width 1080px  height 640px  position relative   gt       lt h1 class  Bold Gray 45px  gt Modal Header lt  h1 gt       lt div class  tabBleed  gt  lt  div gt       lt ul class  tabs  gt         lt li class  current  gt   lt a href     class  tabLink  id  link1  gt Tab Title Link lt  a gt           lt div class  tabContent  id  tabContent1-1  gt             lt div class  modalCol  gt               lt p gt Your Tab Content lt  p gt               lt p gt  lt a href     class  tabShopLink  gt tabBased Anchor Link lt  a gt   lt  p gt             lt  div gt             lt div class  tabsImg  gt   lt  div gt           lt  div gt         lt  li gt         lt li gt   lt a href     class  tabLink  id  link2  gt Tab Title Link lt  a gt           lt div class  tabContent  id  tabContent1-2  gt             lt div class  modalCol  gt               lt p gt Your Tab Content lt  p gt               lt p gt  lt a href     class  tabShopLink  gt tabBased Anchor Link lt  a gt   lt  p gt             lt  div gt             lt div class  tabsImg  gt   lt  div gt           lt  div gt         lt  li gt       lt  ul gt     lt  div gt   lt  div gt    Of course you can repeat that pattern  with more LI s

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According to Wikipedia      Selectors are unable to ascend            CSS offers no way to select a parent or ancestor of element that satisfies certain criteria  A more advanced selector scheme  such as XPath  would enable more sophisticated stylesheets  However  the major reasons for the CSS Working Group rejecting proposals for parent selectors are related to browser performance and incremental rendering issues       And for anyone searching SO in future  this might also be referred to as an ancestor selector   Update    The Selectors Level 4 Spec allows you to select which part of the select is the subject      The subject of the selector can be explicitly identified by prepending   a dollar sign     to one of the compound selectors in a selector    Although the element structure that the selector represents is the   same with or without the dollar sign  indicating the subject in this   way can change which compound selector represents the subject in that   structure       Example 1       For example  the following selector represents a list item LI unique child of   an ordered list OL   OL  gt  LI only-child       However the following one represents an ordered list OL having a unique child    that child being a LI    OL  gt  LI only-child       The structures represented by these two selectors are the same    but the subjects of the selectors are not    Although this isn t available  currently  November 2011  in any browser or as a selector in jQuery

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I had the same problem with Drupal  Given the limitations of CSS  the way to get this working is to add the  active  class to the parent elements when the menu HTML is generated  There s a good discussion of this at http   drupal org node 219804  the upshot of which is that this functionality has been rolled in to version 6 x-2 x of the nicemenus module  As this is still in development  I ve backported the patch to 6 x-1 3 at http   drupal org node 465738 so that I can continue to use the production-ready version of the module

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Many people answered with jQuery parent  but just to add on to that I wanted to share a quick snippet of code that I use for adding classes to my navs so I can add styling to li s that only have sub-menus and not li s that don t      li ul   parent   addClass  has-sub

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Late to the party again but for what it s worth it is possible using jQuery to be a little more succinct  In my case I needed to find the  lt ul gt  parent tag for a  lt span gt  tag contained in the child  lt li gt   jQuery has the  has selector so it s possible to identify a parent by the children it contains  updated per  Afrowave s comment ref  https   api jquery com has-selector        ul   has   someId     will select the ul element that has a child element with id someId  Or to answer the original question  something like the following should do the trick  untested       li   has   active

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Unfortunately  there s no way to do that with CSS   It s not very difficult with JavaScript though      JavaScript code  document getElementsByClassName  active   0  parentNode      jQuery code      active   parent   get 0      This would be the  lt a gt  s parent  lt li gt

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Another thought occurred to me just now that could be a pure CSS solution  Display your active class as an absolutely positioned block and set its style to cover up the parent li   a active      position absolute     display block     width 100      height 100      top 0em     left 0em     background-color  whatever     border  whatever       will also need to make sure the parent li is a positioned element so       ul menu li       position relative          For those of you who want to use javascript without jquery     Selecting the parent is trivial  You need a getElementsByClass function of some sort  unless you can get your drupal plugin to assign the active item an ID instead of Class  The function I provided I grabbed from some other genius on SO  It works well  just keep in mind when you re debugging that the function will always return an array of nodes  not just a single node   active li   getElementsByClass  active   a    active li 0  parentNode style whatever  whatever    function getElementsByClass node searchClass tag        var classElements   new Array        var els   node getElementsByTagName tag      use     for all elements     var elsLen   els length      var pattern   new RegExp    b  searchClass    b        for  i   0  j   0  i  lt  elsLen  i             if   pattern test els i  className             classElements j    els i          j           return classElements

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The first draft of Selectors Level 4 outlines a way to explicitly set the subject of a selector  This would allow the OP to style the list element with the selector  li  gt  a active From Determining the Subject of a Selector   For example  the following selector represents a list item LI unique child of an ordered list OL  OL  gt  LI only-child However the following one represents an ordered list OL having a unique child  that child being a LI   OL  gt  LI only-child The structures represented by these two selectors are the same  but the subjects of the selectors are not   Edit  Given how  quot drafty quot  a draft spec can be  it s best to keep tabs on this by checking the CSSWG s page on selectors level 4

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Future answer with CSS4 selectors  New CSS Specs contain an experimental  has pseudo selector that might be able to do this thing   li has a active                    The browser support on this is basically non-existent at this time  but it is in consideration on the official specs     Answer in 2012 that was wrong in 2012 and is even more wrong in 2018  While it is true that CSS cannot ASCEND  it is incorrect that you cannot grab the parent element of another element  Let me reiterate   Using your HTML example code  you are able to grab the li without specifying li  ul   a       property value      In this example  the ul is the parent of some element and that element is the parent of anchor  The downside of using this method is that if there is a ul with any child element that contains an anchor  it inherits the styles specified   You may also use the child selector as well since you ll have to specify the parent element anyway   ul gt li a       property value      In this example  the anchor must be a descendant of an li that MUST be a child of ul  meaning it must be within the tree following the ul declaration  This is going to be a bit more specific and will only grab a list item that contains an anchor AND is a child of ul   SO  to answer your question by code   ul menu  gt  li a active       property value      This should grab the ul with the class of menu  and the child list item that contains only an anchor with the class of active

[css] Complex CSS selector for parent of active child

THE “PARENT” SELECTOR

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