How to find the nearest common ancestors of two or more nodes?

Question

Users selects two or more elements in a HTML page. What i want to accomplish is to find those elements\' common ancestors (so body node would be the common ancestor if none

Answer 1

Here's another pure method that uses element.compareDocumentPosition() and element.contains(), the former being a standards method and the latter being a method supported by most major browsers excluding Firefox:

Comparing two nodes

function getCommonAncestor(node1, node2) {
    var method = "contains" in node1 ? "contains" : "compareDocumentPosition",
        test   = method === "contains" ? 1 : 0x10;

    while (node1 = node1.parentNode) {
        if ((node1[method](node2) & test) === test)
            return node1;
    }

    return null;
}

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/3FaRr/ (using lonesomeday's test case)

This should be, more or less, as efficient as possible since it is pure DOM and has only one loop.

---

Comparing two or more nodes

Taking another look at the question, I noticed the "or more" part of the "two or more" requirement had gone ignored by the answers. So I decided to tweak mine slightly to allow any number of nodes to be specified:

function getCommonAncestor(node1 /*, node2, node3, ... nodeN */) {
    if (arguments.length < 2)
        throw new Error("getCommonAncestor: not enough parameters");

    var i,
        method = "contains" in node1 ? "contains" : "compareDocumentPosition",
        test   = method === "contains" ? 1 : 0x0010,
        nodes  = [].slice.call(arguments, 1);

    rocking:
    while (node1 = node1.parentNode) {
        i = nodes.length;    
        while (i--) {
            if ((node1[method](nodes[i]) & test) !== test)
                continue rocking;
        }
        return node1;
    }

    return null;
}

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/AndyE/3FaRr/1