Find prev () tags with multiple selectors

Question

Let's look at this situation:

<ul> <li>data</li> <li class="selector">data2</li> <li class="selector2">data3</li> </ul> 

What I'm trying to do is match li , which either has a selector class or has an undefined class attribute, something like this:

 jQuery(function($) { $('.selector2').prevAll('li.selector OR li[class==""]'); }); 

So, if I execute prevAll() on .selector2 , it should return 2 list items. If I ran it on .selector , it should return the first element of the list.

So, is there a way to replace this OR ...?

PS: xpath may work for me too, as I design for modern browsers

Answer 1

 jQuery(function($) { $('.selector2').prevAll('li.selector, li:not([class])'); }); 

Demo

Adding an important comment from @pimvdb

This is correct, but be careful - something like .addClass("foo").removeClass("foo") leaves the class attribute behind, although you (probably) expect it to be in this initial state. So this is not quite the same as [class=''] .

Answer 2

What I'm trying to do is match li , which either has a class of "selector" or have an attribute of class undefined

This XPath expression is equivalent to the pseudo code in the question :

 /ul/li[@class='selector2']/preceding-sibling::li[@class='selector' or not(@class)] 

However, a literal translation of the specified requirement :

 /ul/li[@class='selector' or not(@class)]