Question

I am using the following jQuery

var etag = 'kate'
if (etag.length > 0) {
    $('div').each(function () {
        $(this).find('ul:not(:contains(' + etag + '))').hide();
        $(this).find('ul:contains(' + etag + ')').show();
    });
}​

towards the following HTML

<div id="2">
<ul>
  <li>john</li>
  <li>jack</li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>kate</li>
  <li>clair</li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>hugo</li>
  <li>desmond</li>
</ul>  
<ul>
  <li>said</li>
  <li>jacob</li>
</ul>
  </div>

    <div id="3">
<ul>
  <li>jacob</li>
  <li>me</li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>desmond</li>
  <li>george</li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>allen</li>
  <li>kate</li>
</ul>  
<ul>
  <li>salkldf</li>
  <li>3kl44</li>
</ul>
</div>

basically, as long as etag has one word, the code works perfectly and hides those elements who do not contain etag. My problem is, when etag is multiple words (and I don’t have control over it. Its coming from a database and could be combination of multiple words separated with space char) then the code does not work..

is there any way to achieve this?

Answer 1

This filter checks if any of the words in the given string match the text of the element.

jQuery.expr[':'].containsAny = function(element, index, match) {
    var words = match[3].split(/\s+/);
    var text = $(element).text();
    var results = $.map(words, function(word) {
        return text === word;
    });
    return $.inArray(true, results) !== -1;
};

Show and hide as:

$('ul').hide();
$('li:containsAny(john kate)').parents('ul').show();

See an example here.