Question

I have a problem: I want to get all elements with class dirty not below a dirty element 🙂 As you can guess it’s used to refresh contents of viewports.
My take so far:

$(".dirty").not(".dirty .dirty")

Is there a better approach?

Answer 1

The most simplest way is by using the jQuery :not selector.

In your case:

$(".dirty:not(.dirty .dirty)").whatever();

Here’s a jsFiddle

Explaining the :not selector:

The :not(selector) selector matches every element that is NOT the
specified element/selector.

The .not() method will end up providing you with more readable
selections than pushing complex selectors or variables into a :not()
selector filter. In most cases, it is a better choice.

A selector with which to filter by.

Take a look at the CSS3 :not selector on W3Schools and the jQuery page for better understanding.