jquery selector before-last

Question

I have a dynamic list and need to select the before last item.

<ul class="album">
    <li id='li-1'></li>
    <!-- ... -->
    <li id='li-8'></li>
    <li id='li-9'></li>
    <li class='drop-placeholder'>drag your favorites here</li>
</ul>

var lastLiId = $(".album li:last").attr("id"); // minus one?

Answer 1

Probably a neater way but how about:

var lastLiId = $(".album li:last").prev("li").attr("id");

Answer 2

You can use .eq() with a negative value (-1 is last) to get n from the end, like this:

$(".album li").eq(-2).attr("id"); // gets "li-9"

You can test it here.

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Given the comments below, I want to be clear that this works in jQuery 1.3 as well (test it here), it's not 1.4+ specific, .eq() has always accepted negative numbers (though the docs say 1.4)...it just didn't accept -1 specifically. -2 or any other value works prior to 1.4, only .eq(-1) requires jQuery 1.4+, and we're not using that here.