Book Image

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Book Image

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning jQuery
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Custom Selectors


To the wide variety of CSS and XPath selectors, jQuery adds its own custom selectors. Most of the custom selectors allow us to pick certain elements out of a line-up, so to speak. The syntax is the same as the CSS pseudo-class syntax, where the selector starts with a colon (:). For example, if we wanted to select the second item from a matched set of divs with a class of horizontal, we would write it like this:

$('div.horizontal:eq(1)')

Note that the eq(1) gets the second item from the set because JavaScript array numbering is zero-based, meaning that it starts with 0. In contrast, CSS is one-based, so a CSS selector such as $('div:nth-child(1)') gets any div that is the first child of its parent.

Styling Alternate Rows

Two very useful custom selectors in the jQuery library are :odd and :even. Let’s take a look at how we can use these selectors for basic table striping, given the following table:

<table>
<tr>
  <td>As You Like It</td>
  <td>Comedy...