jQuery - find table row containing table cell containing specific text

I need to get a tr element which contains a td element which contains specific text. The td will contain that text and only that text (so I need text = 'foo' not text contains 'foo' logic).

So I need the equivalent of the following 'pseudo jQuery':

var tableRow = $(table td[text = 'foo']).parent('tr');

Can anyone provide the correct syntax?

You can use filter() to do that:

var tableRow = $("td").filter(function() {
    return $(this).text() == "foo";
}).closest("tr");

I know this is an old post but I thought I could share an alternative [not as robust, but simpler] approach to searching for a string in a table.

$("tr:contains(needle)"); //where needle is the text you are searching for.

For example, if you are searching for the text 'box', that would be:

$("tr:contains('box')");

This would return all the elements with this text. Additional criteria could be used to narrow it down if it returns multiple elements

$(function(){
    var search = 'foo';
    $("table tr td").filter(function() {
        return $(this).text() == search;
    }).parent('tr').css('color','red');
});

Will turn the text red for rows which have a cell whose text is 'foo'.

This will search text in all the td's inside each tr and show/hide tr's based on search text

 $.each($(".table tbody").find("tr"), function () {                              
                
                if ($(this).text().toLowerCase().replace(/\s+/g, '').indexOf(searchText.replace(/\s+/g, '').toLowerCase()) == -1)
                    $(this).hide();
                else
                    $(this).show();
 });

   <input type="text" id="text" name="search">
<table id="table_data">
        <tr class="listR"><td>PHP</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>MySql</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>AJAX</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>jQuery</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>JavaScript</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>HTML</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>CSS</td></tr>
        <tr class="listR"><td>CSS3</td></tr>
</table>

$("#textbox").on('keyup',function(){
        var f = $(this).val();
      $("#table_data tr.listR").each(function(){
            if ($(this).text().search(new RegExp(f, "i")) < 0) {
                $(this).fadeOut();
             } else {
                 $(this).show();
            }
        });
    });

Demo You can perform by search() method with use RegExp matching text