Question

I have some elements that when clicked will fire some action and select the “class” attribute.

in jQuery it’s simple by using $(this).attr('class')

but the problem is that when we want to select one class from multiple classes like when we have for example:

<a href="#" class="class1 class2"></a>

and we want to get only the first class (class1) because when we use this: $(this).attr('class') we will get “class1 class2” as a result.

any idea?

Answer 1

To get the first class:

$(this).attr('class').split(' ')[0];

However, the idea of classes is that they are unordered, hence there’s no jQuery method to do this directly. You may wish to include a data- attribute instead:

<a href="#" class="class2" data-target="someId"></a>

With jQuery 1.4.3+ you can directly access the data-target attribute with:

$(this).data('target');