Question

Suppose I have

<table>
  <tr>
    <td><a class='ilink'> link text </a></td>
    <td></td>
    <td></td>
  <tr>
  <tr>
    <td><a class='ilink'> link text </a></td>
    <td></td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>
</table>

in the jquery code, after clicking the link, I want to highlight the entire table row that the link is in. But how can I find it?

Answer 1

You can do it with .closest() like this:

$("a.ilink").click(function() {
  $(this).closest("tr").addClass("highlight");
});

If you have a lot of rows, this would be more efficient (one copy of this vs. one for every <a>):

$("table").delegate("a.ilink", "click", function(){
  $(this).closest("tr").addClass("highlight");
});