Question

In the following html, can I hide the content starting from ( and ending at ) using CSS or jQuery. The problem I’m facing is that the ( and later code is not wrapped in any div, so I can not use CSS to find the div class and set display:none.

<span>
    <a class="test" href="#">test</a> 
    (<a href="#">?</a>) 
</span>

Answer 1

$('span a:not(".test")').hide(); will work on your limited example.

However, it won’t hide the parentheses. To do that, you’ll need a specialized function to remove just the code you don’t want:

$('span').html(function(i,old) {
    return old.substring(0,old.indexOf('('));
});​

http://jsfiddle.net/pkMgP/

If you want to hide that instead of removing it, you’ll need to wrap it all up in an HTML element and apply styles to that:

$('span').html(function(i,old) {
    var idx = old.indexOf('(');
    return old.substring(0,idx) + '<span style="display:none">' + old.substring(idx) + '</span>';
});​

http://jsfiddle.net/pkMgP/1/