I have a table containing many pairs of text input fields in separate columns. I want to iterate through the input fields in the first column and use those values to set the va
Lots of ways to do this. Here's one.
$("tr").each(function() {
$(this).find(":last-child input").val($(this).find(":first-child input").val());
});
or another:
$("input.left").each(function() {
$(this).parent().nextSibling().find("input.right").val(this.value);
});
and so on.
What you are wanting to do is known as a 'zip' operation. This is something seen in functional programming languages quite a lot. It is a function that combines two sequences of equal length into a single sequence containing a pair (or n-tuple) of elements.
Here you can find an implementation of 'zip' for jquery. It's a jQuery plugin. Available on Google Code
It looks like you can use it like tihs:
$.zip($("input.left"), $("input.right")).each(function () {
var left = this[0];
var right = this[1];
})