Question

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jquery select iframe children

I have many frames in my asp.net website. Since I don’t know its layout and I need to update a <span> value in a diferent diferent frame where my jquery code is, I do the following:

$('#myspan').text('sometext');

but anything changes. So I don’t know if it’s because jquery didn’t manage to catch the element with this selector because is not in its scope or why.

However this:

alert($('#myspan')); it shows an alert with [object][object] as result.

Answer 1

The jQuery function ($('someSelector')) will always return an object, even if no elements match the selector.

If you really are using multiple frames, you have a problem: jQuery can’t find elements across frames, only in the current document/frame – unless you pass a proper context object for the specific document you want to target.

For example, if you have an <iframe id="myframe">, you can look for #myspan inside it with this:

var frameDoc = $('#myframe')[0].contentWindow.document;
var mySpan = $('#myspan', frameDoc);

For that to work, the iframe’s source must be hosted in the same domain as the main page. There’s also the following cleaner options, suggested in the comments below:

var mySpan = $("#myframe").contents().find('#myspan')

or

var mySpan = $('#myspan', $("#myframe").contents());