Question

I’m trying to select with jQuery all the rows from a table except the first one (column titles) and for that I have this selector:

$("#tableID tr:not(:first)")

Having three rows, one for column titles, and two for content, the selector returns 4, but if I do:

$("#tableID tr")

It returns the three rows just fine. Am I missing something in the selector?

I made a screenshot if it helps:

The code that gives me the problem is this (it is stupidly simple, I don’t understand why it doesn’t work)

    function addTableColumn() {
        var uls = $('#debate ul').length;
        $('#debate tr:first ').append("<th id='foo'>foo title</th>");    
        $("#debate tr:not(#debate tr:first)").append("<td><ul id='sortable" + (uls+1) + "' class='connectedSortable'></ul></td>").hide().fadeIn("slow");
        alert("I'm seeing " + $('#debate tr:not(:first)').length + " rows (without first row), type: " + $('#debate tr:not(:first)')[0] + " but the row count returns (including titles) " + $('#debate tr').length);
        makeSortable();
    }

Answer 1

If it’s a title row, I would recommend changing your markup to something like so:

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Title</th>
            <th>Title</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td>Content</td>
            <td>Content</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Content</td>
            <td>Content</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Content</td>
            <td>Content</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

And then, in your CSS/jQuery, only select the <tr>s in <tbody>, it’s also more semantic this way.