jQuery traversing, which means “to travel or pass across, over, or through”, are used to find HTML elements based on their relation to other page elements. It’s kind of like another form of jQuery selectors.

The following are some quick examples of traversing methods. A complete list of traversing methods can be found here along with more detailed descriptions of their intended use and syntax.

The children() method returns all direct children of the selected element.

// searches for all children of a ul tag and applies CSS
$('ul').children().css({'color': 'red'});

The closest() method returns the first ancestor of the selected element.

// searches for the first ancestor of a div that is a ul tag and applies CSS
$('div').closest('ul').css({'color': 'red'});

The first() method returns the first element of the selected elements.

// returns the first paragraph in a div and applies CSS
$('div p').first().css('color', 'red');

The last() method returns the last element of the selected elements.

// returns the last paragraph in a div and applies CSS
$('div p').last().css('color', 'red');

The not() method returns elements that do NOT match a certain criteria. Elements that DO match are removed.

// finds paragraphs that do NOT have a class of .third and applies CSS
$('p').not('.third').css('color', 'red');

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

// finds the parent of paragraph elements and applies CSS
$('p').parent().css({'color': 'red'});

The siblings() method returns all sibling elements of the selected element.

// finds ALL siblings of a p element and applies CSS
$('p').siblings().css({'color': 'red'});

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