How to select all content between two tags in jQuery

Question

I have a document with headings and unordered lists.

How can I use JQuery to select a given heading (by its unique class name) AND all content between that heading and the next heading?

Update:

Your suggestions are great, but aren't what I'm looking for. In the below code, for example, I would like to access only the "h1" with id of "heading2" and everything up to, but not including the "h1" with id of "heading3".

The jQuery examples provided above will access everyting after the first "h" tag that is not an "h" tag.

... or, correct me if I'm wrong :)

    <h1 id="heading1">...</h1>
        <ul>...</ul>
        <p>...</p>
        <ul>...</ul>
        <p>...</p>
    <h1 id="heading2" >...</h1>
        <ul>...</ul>
        <p>...</p>
        <ul>...</ul>
        <p>...</p>
    <h1 id="heading3" >...</h1>
        <ul>...</ul>
        <p>...</p>
        <ul>...</ul>
        <p>...</p>

Malevolent

Answer 1

Two methods in particular would be very useful solving this problem: .nextUntil, and .andSelf. The first will grab all of the siblings following your selector, and the latter will lump in whatever is matched by your selector as well, giving you one jQuery object that includes them all:

$("#heading2")
    .nextUntil("#heading3").andSelf()
        .css("background", "red");

This results in the following:

Monafo

Thanks for the JQuery lesson! Worked like a charm. – Malevolent

Thanks. This helped solve a nightmare problem with Firefox 3.6.4 and nextUntil() – Mckellar

any idea how to do this in cheerio? – Preteritive

Looks like .andSelf is deprecated and we need to use .addBack() from jQuery 1.8 onwards api.jquery.com/addBack – Siu

Answer 2

Here is the solution I use for my projects:

jQuery selector

(function ($) {
    $.fn.between = function (elm0, elm1) {
        var index0 = $(this).index(elm0);
        var index1 = $(this).index(elm1);

        if (index0 <= index1)
            return this.slice(index0, index1 + 1);
        else
            return this.slice(index1, index0 + 1);
    }
})(jQuery);

Usage

$('body').between($('#someid'), $('#someid2')).each(function () {
    // Do what you want.
});

Spun

Answer 3

$('#secondSelector').prevAll('#firstSelector ~ *')

Tress

smart. exactly what I needed. – Bently

Answer 4

Yeah, you're right. This will only avoid the desired selector. Maybe it needs to be more detailed:

$(firstSelector).nextAll().not(secondSelector).not($(secondSelector).nextAll()).text()

Salazar

Answer 5

I feel as if the accepted answer needs a bit of an update since the release of jQuery 1.8 and later. .andSelf() has been deprecated. In its place, we have .addBack(). The documentation explains everything you need to know.

Selfexistent

Answer 6

Maybe, with

$(selectorForFirstHeading).nextAll().not(selectorForLastHeading).text()

Why do I use text()? Because html() will only return the inner HTML of the first result element.

Salazar

Answer 7

If your elements are at the same level, something like this:

<h1 id="heading1">...</h1>
<ul>...</ul>
<p>...</p>
<ul>...</ul>
<p>...</p>
<h1 id="heading2" >...</h1>

That is, your next heading element is not a child of an element at the same level as the first heading element. You can try this code:

// This will get all the following siblings of <h1 id="heading1"> except those that are headings themselves
var elements = $('#heading1').nextAll().not("h1");

Gulden

Hi, good answer, we have the same idea but you missed to serve the content :) – Salazar