jQuery: how to get the index of an element in the selection array?

Question

I have an HTML structure like this:

<div class="container">
  <div class="item">
    <a href="#">1</a>
    <a href="#">2</a>
    <a href="#">3</a>
  </div>
  <div class="item">
    <a href="#">4</a>
    <a href="#">5</a>
    <a href="#">6</a>
  </div>
</div>

I select all the A-s with jQuery, and get a total of 6 objects here. I want to get the index of the A in the array of 6 (so I can detect which A has been clicked, for example), but when I use .index() I get the index of the element relative to its parent. So for the 5th A I get the same index as for the 2nd, because te 5th is actually the second in its group within its div.item:

$('a').click(function(){
    console.log ( $(this).index() ); // returns "1" for the 5th A
});

So is there a way to get the index of the clicked element within the array of the selection, instead of within the parent in the DOM?

Answer 1

You can pass the clicked element to the index method:

var $a = $('.container > .item > a').click(function() {
    console.log ( $a.index(this) ); 
});