Question

I have this html:

<table>
    <tr id="1"><td>test</td><td id="90">value</td></tr>
    <tr id="2"><td>another</td><td id="98">somthing</td></tr>
</table>

and this jquery:

  $("tr td:nth-child(2)").find(":contains('value')").each(function(){
        alert($(this).parent().attr("id"));
            });

I had assumed this would work, but it doesn’t alert anything. If I remove the find portion it will alert with both values. Is there a way that I can include the find somehow?

Here is the fiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/B4wMp/2/

Answer 1

The correct way to do it is like this :

$("tr td:nth-child(2):contains('value')").each(function(){
alert($(this).parent().attr("id"));
    });

Why it wasn’t working the way you had it written? Because from the first selector you get the td which has the word “value” in it and the td which has the word “something” in it. After getting that selection, running .find(“…”) on those elements starts looking for elements inside of what you currently have. Since both tds don’t have any other element inside them, that .find() selector returns nothing.