Question

Along with a number of other a class elements, I’ve got a link with the markup

<a class="editLink" href="www.somelink.com"> Edit <\a>

And I want to select every a element using jQuery except those in this editLink class.

So I’ve used a.not(".editLink") for the jQuery selector which works fine. However I noticed that this also works when I do a.not("editLink") and a.not("#editLink")

It’s like the jQuery ignores the CSS passed as part of the not() method argument. The docs suggest it is necessary to pass the id/class CSS but from what I can tell it’s un-necessary.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Am I being stupid or is there some magic happening?

Thanks

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Update – Okay I think I made an error with my syntax. I was doing:

$("p, a.not(".editLink")").click()...

When it should have been

$("p, a").not("a.editLink").click()...

So my bad. Interestingly though the original did select all the a element apart from those in the editLink class.

Thanks for your help 🙂

Answer 1

It does require a selector string. It’s just treating "editLink" as a selector string that represents an element called <editLink>, which clearly your <a> elements are not.

So, your code a.not("editLink") “works”… just not the way you expect it to: instead of filtering out those elements that don’t have a class with that name, it does nothing because none of the <a> elements are <editLink> elements. And, if none of your <a> elements have an ID with that name either, then the same goes for a.not("#editLink").