Question

I’m a little confused about which jQuery method and/or selectors to use when trying to select an element, and then remove certain descendant elements from the wrapped set.

For example, given the following HTML:

<div id="article">
  <div id="inset">
    <ul>
      <li>This is bullet point #1.</li>
      <li>This is bullet point #2.</li>
      <li>This is bullet point #3.</li>
    </ul>
  </div>
  <p>This is the first paragraph of the article</p>
  <p>This is the second paragraph of the article</p>
  <p>This is the third paragraph of the article</p>
</div>

I want to select the article:

var $article = $('#article');

but then remove <div id="inset"></div> and its descendants from the wrapped set. I tried the following:

var $article = $('#article').not('#inset');

but that didn’t work, and in retrospect, I think I can see why. I also tried using remove() unsuccessfully.

What would be the correct way to do this?

Ultimately, I need to set this up in such a way that I can define a configuration array, such as:

var selectors = [
  {
    select: '#article',
    exclude: ['#inset']
  }
];

where select defines a single element that contains text content, and exclude is an optional array that defines one or more selectors to disregard text content from.

Given the final wrapped set with the excluded elements removed, I would like to be able to call jQuery’s text() method to end up with the following text:

This is the first paragraph of the article.
This is the second paragraph of the article.
This is the third paragraph of the article.

The configuration array doesn’t need to work exactly like that, but it should provide roughly equivalent configuration potential.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Answer 1

I suppose you do not want to modify the original HTML by removing elements from it, but you want to just get the content of article without the inset.
Thats why I would use clone() to get a copy of the article and then remove the inset from it.

Like this:

$("#article").clone().find("#inset").remove().end().text()

• $(“#article”) selects the article div, clone creates a
  copy,
• find gets the children to
  remove (you could also use children),
• remove(), removes the selected inset,
• end() goes back to the original selection.

At the end I just added text() as you mentioned you wanted to do that.