Jquery: get ancestors (or descendants) and self

Question

One can use matchedset.find(selector) / matchedset.parents(selector) to get the descendants/ancestors of the current matched set filtered by a selector, but that doesn't include the matched set itself (if it happens to match the selector too). Is there a better (more concise and/or faster) way to get it than

matchedset.find(selector).add(matchedset.filter(selector))

and the respective for parents() ?

Answer 1

Look up the "andSelf()" function.

Answer 2

You can do this:

matchedset.find('*').andSelf().filter(selector);

For parents:

matchedset.parents('*').andSelf().filter(selector);

Answer 3

I think your method is efficient in terms of execution time, but what you're probably asking for is syntactic sugar. For that, you could wrap it into a plugin:

  jQuery.fn.findAndSelf = function(selector) {
    return this.find(selector).add(this.filter(selector))
  }

Then use it like this:

$('.whatever').findAndSelf('.awesome')

If you wanted to get fancy you could create a plugin that works not only for 'find' but for 'parents' and 'children' and other selector-based plugins:

  jQuery.fn.withSelf = function(plugin, selector) {
    return this[plugin](selector).add(this.filter(selector))
  }

Then you'd supply as the first argument the traversal plugin you want to call:

$('.whatever').withSelf('find', '.awesome')
$('.whatever').withSelf('parents', '.awesome')

Just for kicks, another fun plugin that lets you call an arbitrary number of traversal plugins all at once:

  jQuery.fn.traverse = function(plugins, selector) {
    var set = new jQuery();
    $.each(plugins, function(i, val) {
      set.add(this[val](selector));
    }
    return set
  }

You could invoke this one with any combination of selector-based plugins, as follows:

$('.whatever').traverse(['find','filter'], '.awesome')
$('.whatever').traverse(['parents','find'], '.awesome')
$('.whatever').traverse(['parents', 'filter'], '.awesome')