Question

I didn’t know if there was a post for this already because I don’t know exactly how to word the question, so I’ll give an example..

<ul class=filters>
     <li class=segment-1>
         <a href="#">Web</a>
     </li>
</ul>

The code is for a list that filters a gallery when you click a list item.

I’m thinking I should be able use the code to select “Web” for example so that I can automatically filter the gallery upon the page loading.

$('element*="Web"').click();

Is this the best way to do things? And if it is.. what do I put in place of “element” to select Web

Answer 1

There are better ways, which won’t have to be updated everytime the text of your markup changes slightly.

Either add a class to the anchor tag, with some meaningful name related to its purpose, then do the following (I used navLink as the class name):

$('.navLink').click();

Or use the existing markup hierarchy:

$('ul.filters > li.segment-1 > a').click();

P.S. Note that I fixed the quotation marks around your attribute values in your markup:

<ul class="filters">
     <li class="segment-1">
         <a href="#" class="navLink" >Web</a>
     </li>
</ul>