Question

I want to get an unknown (changing) # of rows from a table, between the 1st cell and the last 3. I’m using jQuery’s each and don’t know why $(this).length doesn’t give the total length of the index.

jQuery:

$("#parent table:first tr").each(function(i){
    var  goodlng =  $(this).parent().children("tr").length -1;   //this works
    var badlng = $(this).length -1;                        //this doesn't! (always == -1)
});

Is the goodlng good practice? it seems like a hack to have to go to parent and then back to children.
Here is a jsfiddle (have console.log()) open.

Example HTML:

<div id="parent">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <td>unwanted 1</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>wanted!</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>unwanted2</td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</div>

tl;dr: Why doesn’t $(this).length == $(this).parent().children("tr").length inside of an each function. and is there another better way of doing this.

Answer 1

Your question says “cells”, but it seems like you’re trying to get the number of rows.

If you really want it inside the .each(), you could use the siblings()^[docs] method and the andSelf()^[docs] method.

$(this).siblings().andSelf().length

But if the rows aren’t changing, why do it repetitively?

Or if they are changing, I’d just use the native rows property on the table to get the length.

var table = $("#parent table:first");

table.find('tr').each(function() {

    var len = table[0].rows.length;

});