jQuery Traversal -Ancestors

An ancestor is a parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on.

With jQuery, you can traverse up the DOM tree to find ancestors of an element.

Traversing Up the DOM Tree

These jQuery methods are very useful; they are used to traverse up the DOM tree:

The parent() method returns the direct parent element of the selected element.

This method only traverses a single level up the DOM tree.

The following example returns the direct parent of each <span> element:

$(document).ready(function(){ $("span").parent(); });

The parents() method returns all ancestor elements of the selected element, going all the way up to the document's root element (<html>).

The following example returns all ancestors of all <span> elements:

$(document).ready(function(){ $("span").parents(); });

You can also use an optional parameter to filter the search for ancestor elements.

The following example returns all ancestors of all <span> elements that are <ul> elements:

$(document).ready(function(){ $("span").parents("ul"); });

The parentsUntil() method returns all ancestor elements between two given elements.

The following example returns all ancestor elements between the <span> and <div> elements:

$(document).ready(function(){ $("span").parentsUntil("div"); });

Other Extensions