Short hand for .parent().parent().parent()

Question

I have a jQuery function, that needs to get the position of an element's parent.

It looks something like:

   function show(e) {
        //debugger;
           var nextTableSelector = $(e).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent();
  }

Is there a short hand for traversing up the DOM structure?

Something along the lines of:

$(e).parent()[5];

Any suggestion?

Note this DOM structure is generated by a 3rd party JS framework, and I'm not able to append any additional ID's or Classes to this structure. I'm stuck having to work my way up through the DOM this way.

Answer 1

So, what you need is either .closest() or .parents(), as below.

var target = $('#source').closest('#target');
var target = $('#source').parents('#target');
alert ( target[0].id );

Sample HTML for the above:

<div id="target">
    Man!
    <div>
        <div>
            <div id="source"></div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

I'd recommend .closest() as .parents() travels up the DOM tree to the document's root element, adding each ancestor element to a temporary collection; it then filters that collection based on a selector if one is supplied whereas .closest() travels up the DOM tree only until it finds a match for the supplied selector.

Edit:

As for your case, you may want to do:

var n = 5; //say you want the 5th parent
var parent5th = $("#source").parents().eq(n-1);
alert (parent5th[0].id);

//So, your code becomes:
var n = 8; //You want the 8th parent
$(e).parents().eq(n-1);

Here is a not-so-ugly function if you will:

$.fn.nthParent = function(level) {

    level = level || 1;
    if (level <= 0) return;

    return level === 1 &&
        $(this).parent() || 
        $(this).parents().eq(level-1);
}

Usage:

//Apply some CSS to level 1 (immediate) parent
$("#source").nthParent().css({
    border: "1px solid red"
});

OR

$(".source").each(function(i) {
    $(this).nthParent(i+1).css({
        border: "4px solid blue"
    });
});

A Demo for the above.

Answer 2

If you can't identify exclusively the element you want but you know its the fifth parent up, you can do $(e).parents().eq(5) or $(e).parents()[5] like you suggested.