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jQuery Traversing Ancestors

With jQuery you can traverse up the DOM tree to find ancestors of an element.An ancestor is a parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on

Traversing Up the DOM Tree

Three useful jQuery methods for traversing up the DOM tree are:

  • parent()
  • parents()
  • parentsUntil()

    • jQuery parent() Method

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

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

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

    Example

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

    jQuery parents() Method

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

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

    Example

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

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

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

    Example

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

    jQuery parentsUntil() Method

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

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

    Example

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

    jQuery Exercises

    Test Yourself With Exercises

    Exercise:

    Use a jQuery method to get the direct parent of a <span> element.

    $("span").();

    Start the Exercise

    jQuery Traversing Reference

    For a complete overview of all jQuery Traversing methods, please go to our jQuery Traversing Reference.

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