Question

The title is a bit confusing but here’s what I’m after:

• I have a set of elements containing all the h3 elements in a page.
  In jQuery terms: var mySet = $('h3').

• I also have an div element var myContainer = $('div#foo')

• I need to find all items in the set mySet that are children of myContainer.

Any ideas? I bet there’s some magical one liner for this but I cannot think of any. I’d rather not loop through every element in the set manually and use .closest(myContainer) or something like that to determine the relationship.

Note that in my scenario, I cannot use a new selector like $('div#foo h3') (that would be too easy) as I don’t have access to the actual selector values. So it has to be dynamic.

Answer 1

Interesting. Assuming you have two jQuery collections and you don’t know the selectors:

var myContainer = $('div');
var mySet = $('h3:even');

filter seems to work:

myContainer.children().filter(mySet)

Keep in mind, however, that this is undocumented as far as I can see, so it may change.
.not can also accept a collection of elements, which works similarly.

Working example: http://jsbin.com/owuru