Question

I have something like this:

<div>
    <ul id="ul_element_id">
        <li>
            <a id="first"></a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <a id="second"></a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <a id="third"></a>
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

Is there a quick way to figure out $(‘#first’) is the first guy in relation to other elements?

Answer 1

I think you are looking for something like the following:

$("a").index($("#first"))

That will return 0 since “#first” is the first in the list. If you did:

$("a").index($("#second"))

you would get 1. If you wanted you could just add 1 to whatever value is returned as long as the returned value is not -1.

Also you can change the $(“a”) selector to whatever you wanted. Something like $(“#ul_id a”) would work just fine too.

You can pass any selector to the index method to search a collection and have it return the index of the found element.

http://api.jquery.com/index/