Question

I’m trying to query an element and its children to find ID’s that begin with a particular string.

var foundIDs = containerElement.find('[id^=something]').andSelf().filter('id^=something');

The find() method only searches descendants so I thought I’d try andSelf(). However, andSelf() does not take a selector. This means that the container element is included regardless of whether it matches the find query or not and I then have to perform a secondary filter() on it to remove the container element if it didn’t match after all.

I attempted to put andSelf() before the find() but it didn’t seem to pick up the container element into the stack.

containerElement.andSelf().find('[id^=something]');

Is there any better way to achieve what I’m doing?

Answer 1

Just off the top of my head (not tested):

var foundIDs = containerElement
                     .filter('id^=something')
                     .add(containerElement.find('id^=something'));

This isn’t that much more efficient than your first effort, but I think it’s a little cleaner.