jQuery Selectors Last and Last-Child

By: SethCardoza - Published: 2009-12-17 22:57:28 in Category: jQuery

jQuery has a plethora of selectors, two of which being :last and :last-child. It should be very obvious that these do not achieve the same goal. Well, I spent the better part of an hour figuring that out. I went down the page of selectors knowing jQuery has a selector for :last-child, and saw :last first. I toyed around with it a bit to no avail. I finally did a couple searches on jQuery last selectors and found out that jQuery also has a :last-child selector, which is what I was really looking for.

The :last selector selects the last element on the page matching the entire selector. The :last-child selector selects all last children matching the entire selector.

$('div p:last') would select the paragraph highlighted in red:

<div>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
<div>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
<div>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
</div>

while $('div p:last-child') would select the paragraphs highlighted in red:
<div>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
<div>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
<div>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
   <p>Paragraph</p>
</div>