Chapter 8. Selectors and Selection Methods
We’ve been using the jQuery selection function, $(), with simple CSS selectors. It is now time
to study the jQuery selector grammar in depth, along with a number of
methods for refining and augmenting the set of selected
elements.
jQuery Selectors
jQuery supports a fairly complete subset of the selector grammar defined by the CSS3 Selectors draft standard, with the addition of some nonstandard but very useful pseudoclasses.
The selector grammar has three layers. You’ve undoubtedly seen the
simplest kind of selectors before. “#test” selects an element with an
id attribute of “test”, “blockquote”
selects all <blockquote> tags
in the document, and “div.note” selects all
<div> tags with a
class attribute of “note”. Simple
selectors can be combined into “selector combinations” such as “div.note>p” and “blockquote i” by
separating them with a combinator character. And
simple selectors and selector combinations can be grouped into
comma-separated lists. These selector groups are the most general kind
of selector that we pass to $().
Before explaining selector combinations and selector groups, we must
explain the syntax of simple selectors.
Simple Selectors
A simple selector begins (explicitly or implicitly) with a tag
type specification. If you are only interested in <p> tags, for example, your simple selector would begin with “p”. If you want to select elements without regard to their tagname, use the wildcard “*” instead. If a selector does not begin ...
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