Question

I’m having an issue with getting the jquery filter method to work.

If I have

$("#resultDiv tr:odd").addClass("alternate_row");

All of the rows within the div “resultDiv” that contains a table are given the alternate row class.

However if i use

 $('#resultDiv').filter("tr:odd").addClass("alternate_row");

It doesn’t appear to match any elements and nothing has the class applied.

I need to use the filter method as I’m doing a few other things passing variables around.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

In your first version:

$('#resultDiv').filter("tr:odd").addClass("alternate_row")

.filter() removes non-matching elements from a set, and none of your #resultDiv elements are tr, so the filter doesn’t match anything.

Try:

$('#resultDiv').find("tr:odd").addClass("alternate_row");

which explicitly adds new descendent nodes that match the tr:odd selector, or

$('#resultDiv tr').filter(":odd").addClass("alternate_row");

which uses a single selector to find all tr elements, and then uses .filter to only pick the odd ones.