An ancestor is a parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on.
With jQuery you can traverse up the DOM tree to find ancestors of an element.
Three useful jQuery methods for traversing up the DOM tree are:
The parent() method returns the direct parent element of the selected element.
This method only traverse a single level up the DOM tree.
The following example returns the direct parent element of each <span> elements:
The parents() method returns all ancestor elements of the selected element, all the way up to the document's root element (<html>).
The following example returns all ancestors of all <span> elements:
You can also use an optional parameter to filter the search for ancestors.
The following example returns all ancestors of all <span> elements that are <ul> elements:
The parentsUntil() method returns all ancestor elements between two given arguments.
The following example returns all ancestor elements between a <span> and a <div> element:
For a complete overview of all jQuery Traversing methods, please go to our jQuery Traversing Reference.