:parent Selector
parent selector
version added: 1.0jQuery(':parent')
Description: Select all elements that are the parent of another element, including text nodes.
This is the inverse of :empty
.
One important thing to note regarding the use of :parent
(and :empty
) is that child elements include text nodes.
The W3C recommends that the <p>
element have at least one child node, even if that child is merely text (see http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-P). Some other elements, on the other hand, are empty (i.e. have no children) by definition: <input>
, <img>
, <br>
, and <hr>
, for example.
Additional Notes:
- Because
:parent
is a jQuery extension and not part of the CSS specification, queries using:parent
cannot take advantage of the performance boost provided by the native DOMquerySelectorAll()
method. To achieve the best performance when using:parent
to select elements, first select the elements using a pure CSS selector, then use.filter(":parent")
.
Example:
Finds all tds with children, including text.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
td { width:40px; background:green; }
</style>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7rc2.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<table border="1">
<tr><td>Value 1</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Value 2</td><td></td></tr>
</table>
<script>$("td:parent").fadeTo(1500, 0.3);</script>
</body>
</html>