Question

Possible Duplicate:
Detecting closest or parent div

I need some help about finding elements with jquery. As topic hints, i need to find the container of given element. i already have a code like;

$('.cancel_button').bind "click", (event) ->
    element = $(this.parentElement)
    ...
    ...

But it seems very ugly to me. Cancel button is in a section element. I wonder if it is possible to do something like

$(this).containerElement('section')

Answer 1

You may be looking for parent or closest:

$(this).parent()

// or

$(this).closest('section')

You might even want to combine them, because closest will return the current element if it matches. So if you had a div that was within a section that was within a div:

<div id="outer">
    <section>
        <div id="inner">....</div>
    </section>
</div>

…and you wanted to get outer when an event occurred on inner, it’d be:

$(this).parent().closest('div');

But when the element you’re starting with doesn’t match the selector, you don’t need it.