Question

I have a moderately simple problem, and I am trying to figure out the best approach to implement it.

For those wondering, this is used to scrape data from a non-editable page (can add css,js, but the rest of the content is closed source and not available for editing)

I am iterating through an element (tr for example), and I only want to look at the cases where a certain number of td elements are present.

Eg, For every tr, I only want to consider the case where it has 3 td children

What is the best way to do that?

Answer 1

You could try something like this:

var result = $('tr').filter( function(){
  return $(this).children('td').length === 3;
});

You can then do any kind of scraping you like. A simple example:

result.each( function(i,e){ // for each row
  // e = one of the selected rows
  $(e).children('td').each( function(i,e){ // for each td in the row
    your_scraping_function( e.text() ); // etc.
  });
});

As @patrick points out below, you can of course chain the scraping process directly to the output of the filter() if it makes sense for your code.

Edit: Added 'td' selector in children(). Belt and suspenders.

Edit: Added example of how to walk through results, as per OP comment.