Check if an element is a child of a parent

Question

If you are only interested in the direct parent, and not other ancestors, you can just use parent(), and give it the selector, as in target.parent('div#hello').

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/6BX9n/

function fun(evt) {
    var target = $(evt.target);    
    if (target.parent('div#hello').length) {
        alert('Your clicked element is having div#hello as parent');
    }
}

Or if you want to check to see if there are any ancestors that match, then use .parents().

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/6BX9n/1/

function fun(evt) {
    var target = $(evt.target);    
    if (target.parents('div#hello').length) {
        alert('Your clicked element is having div#hello as parent');
    }
}

.has() seems to be designed for this purpose. Since it returns a jQuery object, you have to test for .length as well:

if ($('div#hello').has(target).length) {
   alert('Target is a child of #hello');
}

Vanilla 1-liner for IE8+:

parent !== child && parent.contains(child);

Here, how it works:

function contains(parent, child) {
  return parent !== child && parent.contains(child);
}

var parentEl = document.querySelector('#parent'),
    childEl = document.querySelector('#child')
    
if (contains(parentEl, childEl)) {
  document.querySelector('#result').innerText = 'I confirm, that child is within parent el';
}

if (!contains(childEl, parentEl)) {
  document.querySelector('#result').innerText += ' and parent is not within child';
}

<div id="parent">
  <div>
    <table>
      <tr>
        <td><span id="child"></span></td>
      </tr>
    </table>
  </div>
</div>
<div id="result"></div>

If you have an element that does not have a specific selector and you still want to check if it is a descendant of another element, you can use jQuery.contains()

jQuery.contains( container, contained )
Description: Check to see if a DOM element is a descendant of another DOM element.

You can pass the parent element and the element that you want to check to that function and it returns if the latter is a descendant of the first.