Is there anyway to access an iframe's contents via a selector? Something like this:
$("iframe::contents .my-foo")
I'm constantly accessing an iframe's contents for a project I'm currently working on and $("iframe").contents().find(".my-foo")
is becoming a bit tedious to type out.
If this feature doesn't exist in jquery out of the box, is there a plugin that provides this functionality? If not how could I write such a plugin?
I had this issue once where I found it tedious. I never found a solution for how to write a single selector like that.
Even so, the selector is still rather long. The most obvious solution to me is just save it to a variable.
var frame = $("iframe").contents();
frame.find(".my-foo")
...
Is that better?
Intuitively, it seems more elegant to pack everything into the one selector, but the truth is that, even if there were such a selector, it is better from a performance perspective to traverse with find(). Then jQuery doesn't have to parse and analyze the string.
Added here for posterity. The solution I ended up going with was to override the root jquery object with a bit of custom parsing code. Something like this:
(function() {
var rootjq = window.jQuery;
var myjq = function(selector, context) {
if(selector.indexOf("::contents") === -1) {
return rootjq(selector, context);
} else {
var split = selector.split("::contents");
var ifrm = split[0];
var subsel = split.splice(1).join("::contents");
var contents = rootjq(ifrm, context).contents();
// Recursive call to support multiple ::contents in a query
return myjq(subsel, contents);
}
};
myjq.prototype = myjq.fn = rootjq.fn;
window.jQuery = window.$ = myjq;
})();
Note that double colon (::
) in css means select pseudo element, while single colon means select by pseudo class.
You can create your own custom selector. Like:
$.extend($.expr[':'], {
contents: function(elem, i, attr){
return $(elem).contents().find( attr[3] );
}
});
Usage should be like
$('iframe:contents(.my-foo)').remove();