jQuery: click function exclude children.

Trying to wrap my head around the jQuery ".not()" function, and running into a problem. I would like to have the parent div to be "clickable" but if a user clicks on a child element, the script is not called.

$(this).not(children()).click(function(){
   $(".example").fadeOut("fast");
});

the html:

<div class="example">
   <div>
      <p>This content is not affected by clicks.</p>
   </div>
</div>

To do this, stop the click on the child using .stopPropagation:

$(".example").click(function(){
  $(this).fadeOut("fast");
}).children().click(function(e) {
  return false;
});

This will stop the child clicks from bubbling up past their level so the parent won't receive the click.

.not() is used a bit differently, it filters elements out of your selector, for example:

<div class="bob" id="myID"></div>
<div class="bob"></div>

$(".bob").not("#myID"); //removes the element with myID

For clicking, your problem is that the click on a child bubbles up to the parent, not that you've inadvertently attached a click handler to the child.

I'm using following markup and had encoutered the same problem:

<ul class="nav">
    <li><a href="abc.html">abc</a></li>
    <li><a href="def.html">def</a></li>
</ul>

Here I have used the following logic:

$(".nav > li").click(function(e){
    if(e.target != this) return; // only continue if the target itself has been clicked
    // this section only processes if the .nav > li itself is clicked.
    alert("you clicked .nav > li, but not it's children");
});

In terms of the exact question, I can see that working as follows:

$(".example").click(function(e){
   if(e.target != this) return; // only continue if the target itself has been clicked
   $(".example").fadeOut("fast");
});

or of course the other way around:

$(".example").click(function(e){
   if(e.target == this){ // only if the target itself has been clicked
       $(".example").fadeOut("fast");
   }
});

Hope that helps.

Or you can do also:

$('.example').on('click', function(e) { 
   if( e.target != this ) 
       return false;

   // ... //
});

My solution:

jQuery('.foo').on('click',function(event){
	if ( !jQuery(event.target).is('.foo *') ) {
		// code goes here
	} 
});

I personally would add a click handler to the child element that did nothing but stop the propagation of the click. So it would look something like:

$('.example > div').click(function (e) {
    e.stopPropagation();
});

Here is an example. Green square is parent and yellow square is child element.

Hope that this helps.

var childElementClicked;

$("#parentElement").click(function(){

		$("#childElement").click(function(){
		   childElementClicked = true;
		});

		if( childElementClicked != true ) {

			// It is clicked on parent but not on child.
      // Now do some action that you want.
      alert('Clicked on parent');
			
		}else{
      alert('Clicked on child');
    }
    
    childElementClicked = false;
	
});

#parentElement{
width:200px;
height:200px;
background-color:green;
position:relative;
}

#childElement{
margin-top:50px;
margin-left:50px;
width:100px;
height:100px;
background-color:yellow;
position:absolute;
}

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="parentElement">
  <div id="childElement">
  </div>
</div>