Question

I’m basically trying to get the target element from event.target and if not equal process.
How can i get the below thing to work ?

$(document).ready(function(){
   $(document).click(function(event) {

       if(event.target!='#contents') {  //If clicked element is not div #contents show alert .. //How can i achieve this ?
         alert("..");
       }

    });
});

Answer 1

use

   //If clicked element id is not contents 
   if(event.target.id !== 'contents') {  
     alert("..");
   }

EDIT – if the structure is that of your comment use:

  if($(event.target).closest('div#contents').length === 0){
    alert('there is no div with id === "contents" in the ancestors of the clicked li');
   }

EDIT 2 – explanation of my code. If you have this markup

<div id="contents"><ul><li>Item1</li><li>Item2</li></ul></div>

this code means

//event.target is a DOM element, so wrap it into a jQuery object
$(event.target)
        .closest('div#contents')//find a div element going up the dom tree. 
                                //This method returns a jQuery collection that it's 
                                //empty if the div is not found
        .length //the collection has a length 
                //property that is equal to the number of found elements