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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T18:40:58+00:00

Pretty straightforward. I think I have what should be a unique selector, but in

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Pretty straightforward. I think I have what should be a unique selector, but in Chrome it returns two <p> elements. The page I’m looking at is:

http://docs.webfaction.com/user-guide/control_panel.html

and the selector is:

document.querySelectorAll('body:nth-child(2) div#container:nth-child(1) div#content.clear.hasCorners:nth-child(2) div.document:nth-child(3) div.documentwrapper:nth-child(1) div.bodywrapper:nth-child(1)  div.body:nth-child(1) div#the-control-panel.section:nth-child(1) p:nth-child(3)')

I must be misunderstanding something about the nth-child selector because I would think this is guaranteed to be unique.

EDIT: Ah, I should definitely be using some child selectors (>) here to avoid going further down the DOM tree. Someone can feel free to answer it with that and I’ll accept.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As noted above, the issue is that without the child selector (>) there’s no guarantee of uniqueness because there may be additional matches further down the DOM tree. For instance consider this markup:

    <body>
  <div class="foo" id="bar">
    <div class="foo" id="baz"></div>
  </div>
</body>

    if you tried:

    $('body:nth-child(1) .foo:nth-child(1)')

    that would return two elements.

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