Question

What is the best way to get the complement of a jQuery selector’s result set? I want to do something like the following:

jQuery(this).find("div:contains('someValue')").show();

But I want the complement of this selection hidden:

jQuery(this).find("div:not(:contains('someValue'))").hide();

Is there a more elegant solution to this than just executing the complementary selector? An alternative I can see is finding all divs first, storing the result, and filter this:

var results = jQuery(this).find("div");
results.find(":contains('someValue')").show();
results.find(":not(:contains('someValue'))").hide();

But that doesn’t seem that much better. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try like this,

jQuery(this).find("div").hide();
jQuery(this).find("div:contains('someValue')").show();