Find closest previous element jQuery

Question

I am wanting something similar to this person, except the element I want to match might not be a direct sibling.

If I had this HTML, for example,

<h3>
    <span>
        <b>Whaddup?</b>
    </span>
</h3>
<h3>
    <span>
        <b>Hello</b>
    </span>
</h3>
<div>
    <div>
        <img />
    </div>
     <span id="me"></span>
</div>
<h3>
    <span>
        <b>Goodbye</b>
    </span>
</h3>

I would want to be able to do something like this:

var link = $("#me").closestPreviousElement("h3 span b");
console.log(link.text()); //"Hello"

Is there an easy way to do this in jQuery?

EDIT: I should have made my specification a little bit clearer. $("#me") may or may not have a parent div. The code should not assume that it does. I don't necessarily know anything about the surrounding elements.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7018337/find-closest-previous-element-jquery

Answer 1

var link = $("#me").closest(":has(h3 span b)").find('h3 span b');

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/e27r8/

This uses the closest()^[docs] method to get the first ancestor that has a nested h3 span b, then does a .find().

Of course you could have multiple matches.

---

Otherwise, you're looking at doing a more direct traversal.

var link = $("#me").closest("h3 + div").prev().find('span b');

edit: This one works with your updated HTML.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/e27r8/2/

---

EDIT: Updated to deal with updated question.

var link = $("#me").closest("h3 + *").prev().find('span b');

This makes the targeted element for .closest() generic, so that even if there is no parent, it will still work.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/e27r8/4/