How to use nth-child for styling with a table with rowspan?

33
votes

I have a table that has one row that uses rowspan. So,

<table>
 <tr>
  <td>...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td rowspan="2">...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
              <td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td>
 </tr>
</table>

I'd like to use the nth-child pseudo-class to add a background color to every other row, but the rowspan is messing it up; it adds the background color to the row below the row with the rowspan, when in fact I'd like it to skip that row, and move onto the next.

Is there a way to get nth-child to do something smart, or to use [rowspan] in the selector to get around this? So in this case, I'd like the background color to be on rows 1 and 4 but then after that on 6, 8, 10, and so on (since none of those have rowspans)? It's like if I see a rowspan, then I want nth-child to add 1 to n and then continue.

Probably no solution to this, but thought I'd ask :-)

7
htmlcsscss-selectors

7 Answers

44
votes

What seems to work for me is to put a td in the row below with display:none

<table>
   <tr>
      <td rowspan="2">2 rows</td>
      <td>1 row</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td style="display:none"></td>
      <td>1 row</td>
   </tr>
</table>
18
votes

Unfortunately, there's no way to do this with :nth-child() alone, or by using CSS selectors alone for that matter. This has to do with the nature of :nth-child() which selects purely based on an element being the nth child of its parent, as well as with CSS's lack of a parent selector (you can't select a tr only if it doesn't contain a td[rowspan], for example).

jQuery does have the :has() selector that CSS lacks, though, which you can use in conjunction with :even (not :odd as it's 0-indexed versus :nth-child()'s 1-index) for filtering as an alternative to CSS:

$('tr:not(:has(td[rowspan])):even')

jsFiddle preview

5
votes

I had a similar issue and I just overrode the row background with backgrounds on the TD's inside of them. Depending on your desired outcome, this may work for you too?

tr:nth-child(odd) {
    background: #DDE;
}
tr:nth-child(odd) td[rowspan] {
    background: #FFF;
}

Of course you can override other rows like headers, etc with a class or th.

3
votes

Try to separate table by tbody, something like:

tbody tr:nth-child(odd){
  background: #00FFFF;
}
tbody tr:nth-child(even){
  background: #FF0000;
}

tbody:nth-child(odd)  td[rowspan]{
  background: #00FFFF;
}
tbody:nth-child(even)  td[rowspan]{
  background: #FF0000;
}  
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
	<td rowspan="4">...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td rowspan="4">...</td>
	<td>...</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
    <td>...</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>    
<tr>
	<td rowspan="3">...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td rowspan="3">...</td>
	<td>...</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
	<td>...</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
2
votes

You can do this using only CSS if you're willing to add some additional markup. Wrap every "group" of rows in a <tbody> tag. Then add a background color to every odd tbody.

tbody:nth-child(odd) {
  background-color: yellow;
}
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 1</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td rowspan="2">tr 2+3</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 4</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 5</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 6</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 7</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 8</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 9</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>tr 10</td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
0
votes

I used a combination of previous answer to add tr's with display=none programatically:

HTML

  <table>
  <tr>
    <td>A</td>
    <td>B</td> 
    <td>C</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td rowspan=2>1</td>
    <td rowspan=2>2</td>
     <td>sub C 1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>sub C 2</td> 
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>3</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>5</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>6</td>
    <td>7</td>
    <td>8</td>
  </tr>
</table>

CSS

table tr:nth-child(2n) {
  background-color: #F8ECE0;
}

JQUERY

$( "<tr style='display:none'></tr>" ).insertAfter('tbody tr:has(td[rowspan])');

See the JSfiddle.

0
votes

If you are using rowspan just in the first column as in your example you can solve the problem also by using nth-last-child(even)