Question

I have a table that has one row that uses rowspan. So,

<table>
 <tr>
  <td>...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td rowspan="2">...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
              <td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
</table>

I’d like to use the nth-child pseudo-class to add a background color to every other row, but the rowspan is messing it up; it adds the background color to the row below the row with the rowspan, when in fact I’d like it to skip that row, and move onto the next.

Is there a way to get nth-child to do something smart, or to use [rowspan] in the selector to get around this? So in this case, I’d like the background color to be on rows 1 and 4 but then after that on 6, 8, 10, and so on (since none of those have rowspans)? It’s like if I see a rowspan, then I want nth-child to add 1 to n and then continue.

Probably no solution to this, but thought I’d ask 🙂

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there’s no way to do this with :nth-child() alone, or by using CSS selectors alone for that matter. This has to do with the nature of :nth-child() which selects purely based on an element being the nth child of its parent, as well as with CSS’s lack of a parent selector (you can’t select a tr only if it doesn’t contain a td[rowspan], for example).

---

jQuery does have the :has() selector that CSS lacks, though, which you can use in conjunction with :even (not :odd as it’s 0-indexed versus :nth-child()‘s 1-index) for filtering as an alternative to CSS:

$('tr:not(:has(td[rowspan])):even')

jsFiddle preview