Question

I’m trying to figure out how this jQuery plugin works: http://codeasily.com/jquery/multi-column-list-with-jquery

In the plugin there is this line at the beginning:

 if(jQuery('> li', this)) {

I know what

ul > li

means: it means select all li whose direct parent is a ul. But what does ‘> li’ mean? I ran:

$('> li')

but it returns

[]

even though I have plenty of nested unordered list HTML on the page.

Answer 1

Don’t use it. The docs advise that you shouldn’t use at as it will be soon deprecated.

From http://api.jquery.com/child-selector/

Note: The $("> elem", context) selector will be deprecated in a future release. Its usage is thus discouraged in lieu of using alternative selectors.

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But to answer, it effectively uses the element(s) from which the selector is called as the left hand operand of the child-selector.