jQuery exclude elements with certain class in selector

Question

You can use the .not() method:

$(".content_box a").not(".button")

Alternatively, you can also use the :not() selector:

$(".content_box a:not('.button')")

There is little difference between the two approaches, except .not() is more readable (especially when chained) and :not() is very marginally faster. See this Stack Overflow answer for more info on the differences.

use this..

$(".content_box a:not('.button')")

To add some info that helped me today, a jQuery object/this can also be passed in to the .not() selector.

$(document).ready(function(){
    $(".navitem").click(function(){
        $(".navitem").removeClass("active");
        $(".navitem").not($(this)).addClass("active");
    });
});

.navitem
{
    width: 100px;
    background: red;
    color: white;
    display: inline-block;
    position: relative;
    text-align: center;
}
.navitem.active
{
    background:green;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<div class="navitem">Home</div>
<div class="navitem">About</div>
<div class="navitem">Pricing</div>

The above example can be simplified, but wanted to show the usage of this in the not() selector.