Question

I have the jquery:
$(“.item”)

which gives me all elements of class item.

I need to select an item from the array I get from this method, and then find the item before this.

something like: $(“.item”).select(“#3”).prev() – except it should work 🙂

so, assuming I had the list of items:

<div id=1 class="item"></div>
<div id=2 class="item"></div>
<div class="somethingElse"></div>
<div id=3 class="item"></div>
<div id=4 class="item"></div>

I should get the “<div id=2></div>” item.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

prev only looks at the immediate previous sibling. Try this:

$('#3').prevAll('div.item').eq(0);

That should get what you want. As mentioned by googletorp, doing $('.item').find('#3'); is redundant and slower. IDs are supposed to be unique so you should be fine to do $('#3') directly. Do note, however, that IDs, per the spec, are not supposed to start with numbers:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens (“-“), underscores (“_”), colons (“:”), and periods (“.”).