Suppose I have the following HTML:
<div class="foo">
<ul>
<li>One</li>
<li>Two</li>
</ul>
</div> <!-- not originally here -->
<div class="bar">
<ul>
<li>Three</li>
<li>Four</li>
</ul>
</div>
I want to select all li
elements that are not descendants of an element with class foo
. I know I can do it with a fancy filter function, but I'm wondering whether I can do it with just a selector. First I tried:
$(":not(.foo) li")
Unfortunately this doesn't work since the li
has other ancestors without the style (the ul
in this case). The following seems to work;
$(":not(.foo) :not(.foo) li")
In other words, select all li
elements that have no ancestor that either has class foo
or has an ancestor of its own with class foo
. Perhaps this is the best/only way to do it with a selector, but I'm not thrilled about the repetition of the :not
selector. Any better ideas out there?
fiddle