Question

I need to be able to get an unqiue selector for each element on a page.

For example, when I click on an element I want to do something like this:

$(document).click(function(){
    var sel = getUniqueSel(this);
});

So, after storing the sel value in a DB I can get that value and simply access the element by

var el = $(sel);

I can't change and don't know anything about the HTML structure of the page and I can't simply add unique ID's (using JS) to every element as this would be inefficient.

Why cant you give the ones you are interested in an ID? Just curious? Are you really interested in every single object on the page?
@mplungjan I want to store the selectors for all clicked elements on a page :), and this script will be included on many pages.

Grant Thomas · Answer 1 · 2013-03-12 12:20:12Z

an edit has been made to this post; click to load

up vote 0 down vote

So long as things all have identifiers, you could do...

var selector = "#" + $(this).attr("id");

If you can't add these to make sure it works in all instances then you'll need to contrive a away by coupling the element type, attribute values and specific classes, but even then, without a unique identifier, no one thing can be uniquely identified necessarily.

answered 3 mins ago

Grant Thomas
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I can't assume that all elements have IDs. – Cristy 3 mins ago

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@Cristy Then you can't assume to get anything uniquely. – Grant Thomas 1 min ago

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I was thinking something like store the which nth-of-type (relative to the document) and which type is the clicked element. The position in the DOM is unique :) – Cristy 1 min ago

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