Getting a jQuery selector for an element

Question

In psuedo code, this is what I want.

var selector = $(this).cssSelectorAsString(); // Made up method...
// selector is now something like: "html>body>ul>li>img[3]"
var element = $(selector);

The reason is that I need to pass this off to an external environment, where a string is my only way to exchange data. This external environment then needs to send back a result, along with what element to update. So I need to be able to serialize a unique CSS selector for every element on the page.

I noticed jquery has a selector method, but it does not appear to work in this context. It only works if the object was created with a selector. It does not work if the object was created with an HTML node object.

Answer 1

I see now that a plugin existed (with the same name I thought of too), but here's just some quick JavaScript I wrote. It takes no consideration to the ids or classes of elements – only the structure (and adds :eq(x) where a node name is ambiguous).

jQuery.fn.getPath = function () {
    if (this.length != 1) throw 'Requires one element.';

    var path, node = this;
    while (node.length) {
        var realNode = node[0], name = realNode.name;
        if (!name) break;
        name = name.toLowerCase();

        var parent = node.parent();

        var siblings = parent.children(name);
        if (siblings.length > 1) { 
            name += ':eq(' + siblings.index(realNode) + ')';
        }

        path = name + (path ? '>' + path : '');
        node = parent;
    }

    return path;
};

(License: MIT)