Question

To give a simplified example, I’ve got the following block repeated on the page lots of times (it’s dynamically generated):

<div class="box">
   <div class="something1"></div>
   <div class="something2">
      <a class="mylink">My link</a>
   </div>
</div>

When clicked, I can get to the parent of the link with:

$(".mylink").click(function() {
   $(this).parents(".box").fadeOut("fast");
});

However… I need to get to the <div class="something1"> of that particular parent.

Basically, can someone tell me how to refer to a higher-level sibling without being able to refer to it directly? Let’s call it big brother. A direct reference to the big brother’s class name would cause every instance of that element on the page to fade out – which is not the desired effect.

I’ve tried:

parents(".box .something1") ... no luck.
parents(".box > .something1") ... no luck.
siblings() ... no luck.

Anyone? Thanks.

Answer 1

Calling .parents(".box .something1") will return all parent elements that match the selector .box .something. In other words, it will return parent elements that are .something1 and are inside of .box.

You need to get the children of the closest parent, like this:

$(this).closest('.box').children('.something1')

This code calls .closest to get the innermost parent matching a selector, then calls .children on that parent element to find the uncle you’re looking for.