jQuery find which parent is closer?

Question

In jQuery you can call closest to find the closest parent.

If I have a a in a li in a ul in a td in

Answer 1

Here is a simple implementation of the .closer() method that returns the selector that is closest to the given element:

$.fn.closer = function(varargs) {
  var $elem = $(this);
  while ($elem.length) {
    for (var i = 0, len = arguments.length; i < len; i++) {
      if ($elem.is(arguments[i])) {
        return arguments[i];
      }
    }
    $elem = $elem.parent();
  }
  return null;
};

See it in action on jsFiddle.