Question

I have a table with data in:

<td> item </td><td> order code </td><td> price </td>

I’m processing the table with jQuery which needs to find the order code:

$.each($('.productList tbody tr'), function() {
    var orderCode = $(this).find('td:eq(1)').html().trim();
    // do stuff
});

If there are no products, the table shows a message:

<td colspan="3"> There are no products to display </td>

The above row causes the jQuery function to bomb out. What’s the most robust way to use a conditional selector to ignore the “no products” row? Is there a selector for colspan="1" or colspan is not set or whatever it would need to be?

Answer 1

Don’t refine your selector, it won’t scale well because jQuery will have to evaluate every child element. Avoid the error instead…

$('.productList tbody tr').each(function() { 
   var orderCode = $(this).find('td:eq(1)');

   if(orderCode.length > 0) { // Make sure it exists
     orderCode = orderCode.html().trim(); 
     // do stuff 
   }
});