Question

I need to find a specific elements position in a jQuery collection.

For example in a collection of a elements I need to know the numeric position of the element with the “active” class.

<ul>
    <li><a href="#"></a></li>
    <li><a class="active" href="#"></a></li>
    <li><a href="#"></a></li>
</ul>

I assumed using index would be the way to go but the following returns 0 no matter what the location of active.

$('ul li a').index('.active');

Is there any simple way to do what this?

Answer 1

Try this:

$('ul li a.active').index();

Note that even by using correct syntax this code always returns 0 as there is only one anchor link within li tags, you can find the index of parent li element instead.

$('ul li:has(a.active)').index();