---
title: "Calling a method on a jQuery collection"
description: "How do you invoke a method on a jQuery collection."
canonical_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/hidden-feature-of-jquery-calling-a-method-on-a-jquery-collection"
markdown_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/hidden-feature-of-jquery-calling-a-method-on-a-jquery-collection.md"
---

# Calling a method on a jQuery collection

How do you invoke a method on a jQuery collection.

- Author: Neeraj Singh
- Published: January 12, 2010
- Categories: jQuery

I was going through the
[Adding keyboard navigation](http://jqueryfordesigners.com/adding-keyboard-navigation)
and noticed that Remi replaced this code

```javascript
$(".coda-slider-wrapper ul a.current").parent().next().find("a").click();
```

with this code

```javascript
var direction = "next";
$(".coda-slider-wrapper ul a.current").parent()[direction]().find("a").click();
```

I had never seen anything like that. In the above mentioned article, Remi used
`next` and `prev` methods. However I wanted to know all the options I could pass
since this feature is not very documented.

## Snippet from jQuery source code

Here is code from jQuery that makes that above method work.

```javascript
jQuery.each(
  {
    parent: function (elem) {
      return elem.parentNode;
    },
    parents: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.dir(elem, "parentNode");
    },
    next: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.nth(elem, 2, "nextSibling");
    },
    prev: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.nth(elem, 2, "previousSibling");
    },
    nextAll: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.dir(elem, "nextSibling");
    },
    prevAll: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.dir(elem, "previousSibling");
    },
    siblings: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.sibling(elem.parentNode.firstChild, elem);
    },
    children: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.sibling(elem.firstChild);
    },
    contents: function (elem) {
      return jQuery.nodeName(elem, "iframe")
        ? elem.contentDocument || elem.contentWindow.document
        : jQuery.makeArray(elem.childNodes);
    },
  },
  function (name, fn) {
    jQuery.fn[name] = function (selector) {
      var ret = jQuery.map(this, fn);

      if (selector && typeof selector == "string")
        ret = jQuery.multiFilter(selector, ret);

      return this.pushStack(jQuery.unique(ret), name, selector);
    };
  }
);
```

As you can see, a variety of selectors can be passed to jQueryCollection[].

If you want to give a try, any jQuery enabled site should perform all of the
below mentioned code without any problem.

```javascript
var a = $("a:first");
var log = console.log;

log(a["parent"]());
log(a["parents"]());
log(a["next"]());
log(a["prev"]());
log(a["nextAll"]());
log(a["prevAll"]());
log(a["siblings"]());
log(a["children"]());
log(a["contents"]());
```

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/hidden-feature-of-jquery-calling-a-method-on-a-jquery-collection)