parent selector
Description: Select all elements that have at least one child node (either an element or text).
version added: 1.0jQuery( ":parent" )
This is the inverse of :empty
.
One important thing to note regarding the use of :parent
(and :empty
) is that child nodes include text nodes.
The W3C recommends that the <p>
element have at least one child node, even if that child is merely text (see https://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.
To obtain the parents or ancestors of an existing jQuery set, see the .parent()
and .parents()
methods.
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 lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>parent demo</title> <style> td { width: 40px; background: green; } </style> <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.5.0.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>