Question

Lets say I have a selector $('.items') and I want to get every item except those that are contained within an array of jQuery item objects.

I could use filter or grep or each to go through every item selected, and on every item i could make another loop to see if it matches any in the disallowed array.

I am just wondering if there is either a shorthand way of doing this, or a more efficient way? What do you think is the best way of implementing this?

Answer 1

Use filter as it’s the most readable way, and it’s the the purpose of the function- filter…

• each used mainly to do actions on each element in the set.
• grep is for arrays, not jQuery objects, though it can be done with it, it shouldn’t.

How I would do it:

var arr = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'];
$('...').filter(function(){
    return $.inArray(this.id, arr) === -1
});