Question

re,

I have a simple query that works:

$("#test > fieldset > input").each(function() { })

However, I want to select “input” and “select” elements without having to write 2 “each” queries. Is this possible?

thanks.

Answer 1

jQuery provides some nice extensibility features. Here’s a generic filter to select by multiple tag names:

/*
 * element: the current element being matched
 * index: index of the current element
 * match: parse tokens from the filter string
 *
 * match[0] -> full filter string
 * match[1] -> filter name
 * match[2] -> ""
 * match[3] -> filter parameter
 */
jQuery.expr[':'].tags = function(element, index, match) {
    var inputs = match[3].split(',');
    var nodeName = element.nodeName.toLowerCase();
    return $.inArray(nodeName, inputs) !== -1;
};​​​​​

It has a performance hit in that the callback function will be called for each element matching upto the point of the filter, so I wouldn’t recommended this for very large documents.

$("#test > fieldset > :tags(input,select)").hide();