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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T09:12:58+00:00

Running into a spot of trouble and basically trying to create a variable which

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Running into a spot of trouble and basically trying to create a variable which can be used as a selector. eg

$('a').click(function(){
   var selector = $(this).dompath();
});

HTML:

html
    body
        div
            div /div
        /div
       ul
         li
         li
       /ul
    div
        ul
           li
           li
           li hello world
        /ul
   /div
   body
html

this would then return something like

path = html body div ul li:contains('hello world')

then i could use this in a selector to select this div so if i did like

$(path).text() would return "hello world"

many thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Perhaps something like this: 

    function dompath( element )
{
    var path = '';
    for ( ; element && element.nodeType == 1; element = element.parentNode )
    {
        var inner = $(element).children().length == 0 ? $(element).text() : '';
        var eleSelector = element.tagName.toLowerCase() + 
           ((inner.length > 0) ? ':contains(\'' + inner + '\')' : '');
        path = ' ' + eleSelector + path;
    }
    return path;
}

    This modified a method from another question to go through, and add in the full text contents of the tag via a :contains() operator only if the tag has no children tags.

    I had tested with this method:

    $(document).ready(function(){
    $('#p').click(function() {
      console.log(dompath(this));
    });
});

    Against this:

    <html>
    <body>
        <div>
            <div> </div>
        </div>
       <ul>
         <li></li>
         <li></li>
       </ul>
       <div>
         <ul>
           <li id="p">hi</li>
           <li></li>
           <li id="p2">hello world</li>
        </ul>
       </div>
   <body>
<html>

    The results of clicking on p then get output as:

    html body div ul li:contains(‘hi’)

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