44

I'm working on an application that only has jQuery 1.1 installed which dosn't support the .closest method.

My script currently looks like this:

$('.navPanel').find('img').closest('td').hide();

So I'm looking for every image in the .navPanel and traversing up the DOM and hiding the td that it sits in. Does anyone know if there is a vanilla JavaScript function I could simply add to my script that polyfills the missing .closest method?

Thanks for your time.

10
  • .parents()? Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 9:29
  • stackoverflow.com/questions/15329167/… Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 9:29
  • Hi, should have said that .parent() will not work in this instance as some of the pages, the img has a wrapping a href tag around it which will remove this element rather than the td. So it really needs to find the closest td Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 9:31
  • 2
    jQuery 1.1 is over 8 years old! Is there really no way you can update it? Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 9:32
  • 1
    "reluctant" or "lazy"! :D Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 10:05

3 Answers 3

89

Modern browsers have the Element.closest() method.

Example:

document.querySelector('.navPanel img').closest('td')

Reference: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/closest

Here you can check which browsers have built-in support: https://caniuse.com/#feat=element-closest

When there is no support in the browser the following polyfill could be used: https://github.com/jonathantneal/closest

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2 Comments

This is the answer. Thank you much for teaching me things I do not know - and for providing a link to the polyfill.
This is not working in IE and Edge at the moment. The source
35
myImage.parentNode;

Is as vanilla as it gets. Whack that in a loop until you hit the required tag type:

while(thisTag.parentNode.tagName !== 'TD' && thisTag.parentNode != document) // uppercase in HTML, lower in XML
    {
     thisTag=thisTag.parentNode;
    }

That should do the trick in plain old js.

Danny

4 Comments

Of course this has the problem that if you don't find it and gets to document then it will bum out. :)
@Xotic750 - Very true, it would die in horrible ways, but this is javascript ;)
Then just add a checker if the while has hit the html tag then break out of the loop
I still can't believe they called that .tagName instead of .elementName :-/
10

Cause IE still does not support document.querySelector('.element').closest() the simplest thing to do is include the polyfill from MDN Element.closest() . Include it at the very beginning of your javascript codes.

For browsers that do not support Element.closest(), but carry support for element.matches() (or a prefixed equivalent, meaning IE9+), include this polyfill:

if (!Element.prototype.matches) {
  Element.prototype.matches = Element.prototype.msMatchesSelector || 
                              Element.prototype.webkitMatchesSelector;
}

if (!Element.prototype.closest) {
  Element.prototype.closest = function(s) {
    var el = this;

    do {
      if (Element.prototype.matches.call(el, s)) return el;
      el = el.parentElement || el.parentNode;
    } while (el !== null && el.nodeType === 1);
    return null;
  };
}

However, if you really do require IE 8 support, then the following polyfill will do the job very slowly, but eventually. However, it will only support CSS 2.1 selectors in IE 8, and it can cause severe lag spikes in production websites.

if (window.Element && !Element.prototype.closest) {
  Element.prototype.closest =
  function(s) {
    var matches = (this.document || this.ownerDocument).querySelectorAll(s),
        i,
        el = this;
    do {
      i = matches.length;
      while (--i >= 0 && matches.item(i) !== el) {};
    } while ((i < 0) && (el = el.parentElement));
    return el;
  };
}

Comments

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