Selecting an arbitrary cell in a table by row and column number

Question

I have a large table, and I need to be able to select a specific cell using it's cell/row coordinates.

What's the most elegant way of doing this using jQuery?

Answer 1

This is one case where I think using native JavaScript actually makes the code easier to understand:

var table = $("#table")[0];
var cell = table.rows[1].cells[1]; // This is a DOM "TD" element
var $cell = $(cell); // Now it's a jQuery object.

Note that just selecting the table element will make rows include those rows in your thead (and tfoot). What you probably want is:

var table = $("#table tbody")[0];
/* remaining code from above */

Here's an example: http://jsfiddle.net/CgqQt/