jQuery exclude elements with certain class in selector

Question

I want to setup a click event trigger in jQuery for certain anchor tags.

I want to open certain links in a new tab while ignoring ones with a certain class (before you ask I cannot put classes on the links I am trying to catch as they come from a CMS).

I want to exclude links with class "button" OR "generic_link"

I have tried:

$(".content_box a[class!=button]").click(function (e) {
    e.preventDefault();     
    window.open($(this).attr('href'));
});

But that doesn't seem to work, also how do I do an OR statement to include "generic_link" in the exclusion?

Answer 1

You can use the .not() method:

$(".content_box a").not(".button")

Alternatively, you can also use the :not() selector:

$(".content_box a:not('.button')")

There is little difference between the two approaches, except .not() is more readable (especially when chained) and :not() is very marginally faster. See this Stack Overflow answer for more info on the differences.