Question

Using jQuery and coffeescript, I want to update a html element when user presses enter. My code looks like this:

$ ->
  $('p span').live 'keypress', (e) ->      
    if e.keyCode == 13        
      $('div.sidebar-nav ul li a.active').html $(this).attr 'value'

Coffeescript compiles without any errors, but the code is not working. For some reason, if I add change the code to following it works:

$ ->
  $('p span').live 'keypress', (e) ->      
    if e.keyCode == 13
      alert 'some string'
      $('.sidebar-nav a.active').html $(this).attr 'value'

I spend last few hours trying to solve this and still nothing. Any help would be deeply appreciated.

Answer 1

$('.sidebar-nav a.active')

is different than…

$('div.sidebar-nav ul li a.active')

in the first case, a.active is a descendant of .sidebar-nav, and the structure under .sidebar-nav could be anything (list, article, spans, marquees, doesn’t matter, as long as its in there somewhere). In the second, it is a great-grandchild, within a list. We’d need to see your HTML to be sure, but it looks like bad selectors…