Question

I am in the process of implementing jQuery, and taking out Prototype libraries in my codebase, and I am wondering if you could give me the best way to implement this functionality in jQuery.
I am familiar with the jQuery ancestor>descendant syntax, but just want to check if an element is a descendant by true of false, like the code below:
can someone give me the most efficient jQuery solution for this ?

<div id="australopithecus">
  <div id="homo-herectus">
    <div id="homo-sapiens"></div>
  </div>
</div>

$('homo-sapiens').descendantOf('australopithecus');
// -> true

$('homo-herectus').descendantOf('homo-sapiens');
// -> false

Answer 1

I would think you could take advantage of CSS style selection here, with returned length..

$('#australopithecus #homo-sapiens').length // Should be 1
$('#homo-sapiens #homo-herectus').length // Should be 0

Not exactly true/false, but checking 0/1 as a boolean should work. 🙂

Alternately, you could do something like $(‘#parent’).find(‘#child’) and check the length there.