I’ve been meaning to do something like this for a while - it’s always a pain in JS to have to write multiple loops for finding elements to meet certain criteria (for example, an group of elements inheriting some specific classes that are below an element of a specific tag below a specific element).
Most of you now will be thinking about prototype’s $ function which allows you to specify the sort of tags you want in the form you would for CSS. I have stolen this idea and written it up without anything else added to it. All this does is return an array of elements based on the CSS-based string you provide.
For example, you can simply use document.getElements("a") to return an array of all A elements, similar to document.getElementsByTagName("a") but say then, you want only the ones from that array that inherit a specific class. You can use my function like this: document.getElements("a.class") whereas using document.getElementsByTagName would then require a for loop after the call to filter the elements.
So lets say you want to select all of the anchor elements inheriting the class “linkage” that are contained within a span element in your main #content element:
document.getElements("#content span a.linkage");
will return all of the elements that meet these criteria.
Update:
I have not added a new parameter to the function: s. S can reference an element that all of the returned elements must by a child of on some level. This is useful for where you have a reference to an element in javascript, but there is no distinguishable link in the html.
So, for example, lets say you have several elements throughout your HTML and several list li which references it. You can select the elements withni this ‘ambiguous’
var a_li = document.getElements("a", li);
Which would be similar to var a_li = li.getElementsByTagName("a"); except you have the option of expanding this to look for class names and sub-elements.
(end of update)
Update:
I was experiencing a bug in Internet Explorer where my usage of a variable named class within an object was causing runtime errors. I’ve renamed it to solve the problem. I also, at some stage, appear to have renamed the s parameter to elem. It’s still pretty self-explanatory, though.
(end of update)
Anyway, here’s the code:
/**
* Get arrays matching a CSS-Style search query
* @param string e The CSS search query
* @param element elem A specific element to search within (defaults to document.body)
* @return array The found elements matching the query
*/
document.getElements = function(e, elem) {
if (!e || !e.length || e.length == 0)
return [];
var store = [elem||document.body];
var store_t = [];
e = e.split(" ");
for (var i=0; i<e.length; i++) {
var r = {
id: "",
tag: "*",
clas:[]
};
var c, s, t=e*;
while (t.length > 0) {
s = t.search(/.[#\.]/) + 1 || t.length;
c = t.substr(0, s);
if (c.substr(0, 1) == "#") r.id = c.substr(1);
else if (c.substr(0, 1) == ".") r.clas.push(c.substr(1));
else r.tag = c;
t = t.substr(s);
}
while (store.length > 0) {
var curr = [], temp = store.shift().getElementsByTagName(r.tag);
for (var j=0; j<temp.length; j++) {
curr.push(temp[j]);
}
while (curr.length > 0) {
var ok = true, ce = curr.shift();
if (r.id && ce.id!=r.id) ok = false;
for (j=0; j<r.clas.length; j++) {
if ((" "+ce.className+" ").indexOf(" "+r.clas[j]+" ") == -1) {
ok = false;
break;
}
}
if (ok) store_t.push(ce);
}
}
store = store_t;
store_t = [];
}
return store;
};
If you find any bugs, let me know (Not that i’ll necessarily do anything about it, lol).
Hope this helps :thumb:
