Categories

:parent Selector

Categories: jQuery Extensions | Content Filter

jQuery(':parent')

Description: Select all elements that are the parent of another element, including text nodes.

  • jQuery(':parent')

    version added: 1.0

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.

Note:

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 DOM querySelectorAll() 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").
  • Finds all tds with children, including text.

    HTML:
    <table border="1">
    
      <tr><td>Value 1</td><td></td></tr>
      <tr><td>Value 2</td><td></td></tr>
    
    </table>
    CSS:
    
      td { width:40px; background:green; }
      
    Code:
    $("td:parent").fadeTo(1500, 0.3);