jQuery .prev() of a type regardless of it's parent etc

Question

is there a simple way to get the previous occurrence of an element in the DOM? If I\'m looking at #text3 and I want to get ahold of the previous input #text2<

Answer 1

You can use $.index(), like so:

var previous = null;
var inputs = $('input');
var index = inputs.index(this);
if (index > 0) {
    previous = $(inputs[index-1])
}

For example: http://jsfiddle.net/pYaBL/1/