JavaScript closest

By  on  

When it comes to finding relationships between elements, we traditionally think of a top-down approach. We can thank CSS and querySelector/querySelectorAll for that relationship in selectors. What if we want to find an element's parent based on selector?

To look up the element tree and find a parent by selector, you can use HTMLElement's closest method:

// Our sample element is an "a" tag that matches ul > li > a
const link = document.querySelector('li a');
const list = a.closest('ul');

closest looks up the ancestor chain to find a matching parent element -- the opposite of traditional CSS selectors. You can provide closest a simple or complex selector to look upward for!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Drag & Drop Elements to the Trash with MooTools 1.2

    Everyone loves dragging garbage files from their desktop into their trash can. There's a certain amount of irony in doing something on your computer that you also do in real life. It's also a quick way to get rid of things. That's...

  • By
    Parallax Sound Waves Animating on Scroll

    Scrolling animations are fun. They are fun to create and fun to use. If you are tired of bootstrapping you might find playing with scrolling animations as a nice juicy refreshment in your dry front-end development career. Let's have a look how to create animating...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!