jQuery Traversal - Ancestors

Ancestors are the parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, and so on.

With jQuery, you can traverse upwards the DOM tree to find the ancestors of an element.

Traversing Up the DOM Tree

These jQuery methods are useful for traversing up the DOM tree:

The parent() method returns the direct parent element of the selected element.

This method traverses only one level up the DOM tree.

The following example returns the direct parent element of each <span> element:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("span").parent();
});

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:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("span").parents();
});

You can also use an optional parameter to filter the search for ancestor elements.

The following example returns all ancestors of all <span> elements that are <ul> elements:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("span").parents("ul");
});

The parentsUntil() method returns all ancestor elements between two given elements.

The following example returns all ancestor elements between a <span> and a <div> element:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("span").parentsUntil("div");
});