Question

I’m trying to come up with a selector that will select all textarea elements, except those that are descendents of the .noSpell class.

So I want this to match:

<div>
   <textarea />
</div>

but not this

<div class="noSpell">
   <div>
      <textarea />
   </div>
</div>

I tried this:

$(":not(.noSpell) textarea")

but it didn’t work, presumably because while it won’t match the outer element, it can match any of the inner ones.

So, how would I write a selector that excludes parts of the DOM tree based on a class name?

Answer 1

How about this:

$("textarea").not(".noSpell textarea")

All textareas, then remove the ones that have a parent of .noSpell.