Jquery- Get the value of first td in table

Question

I am trying to get the value of first td in each tr when a users clicks "click".

The result below will output aa ,ee or ii. I was thinking about using closest('tr').. but it always output "Object object". Not sure what to do on this one.

My html is

 <table>
   <tr>
      <td>aa</td>
      <td>bb</td>
      <td>cc</td>
      <td>dd</td>
      <td><a href="#" class="hit">click</a></td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td>ee</td>
      <td>ff</td>
      <td>gg</td>
      <td>hh</td>
      <td><a href="#" class="hit">click</a></td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td>ii</td>
      <td>jj</td>
      <td>kk</td>
      <td>ll</td>
      <td><a href="#" class="hit">click</a></td>
   </tr>
</table>

Jquery

$(".hit").click(function(){

 var value=$(this).// not sure what to do here

 alert(value)  ;

});

Answer 1

$(this).parent().siblings(":first").text()

parent gives you the <td> around the link,

siblings gives all the <td> tags in that <tr>,

:first gives the first matched element in the set.

text() gives the contents of the tag.

Answer 2

This should work:

$(".hit").click(function(){    
   var value=$(this).closest('tr').children('td:first').text();
   alert(value);    
});

Explanation:

• .closest('tr') gets the nearest ancestor that is a <tr> element (so in this case the row where the <a> element is in).
• .children('td:first') gets all the children of this element, but with the :first selector we reduce it to the first <td> element.
• .text() gets the text inside the element

---

As you can see from the other answers, there is more than only one way to do this.

Answer 3

In the specific case above, you could do parent/child juggling.

$(this).parents("tr").children("td:first").text()