Skip recursion in jQuery.find() for a selector?

Question

TL;DR: How do I get an action like find(), but block traversal (not full stop, just skip) for a certain selector?

ANSWERS: $(Any).fin

Answer 1

Well, I really don't want to be answering my own question on a bounty, so if anyone can provide a better or alternative implementation please do..

However, being pressed to complete the project, I ended up working on this quite a bit and came up with a fairly clean jQuery plugin for doing a jQuery.find() style search while excluding child branches from the results as you go.

Usage to work with sets of elements inside nested views:

// Will not look in nested ul's for inputs
$('ul').findExclude('input','ul');

// Will look in nested ul's for inputs unless it runs into class="potato"
$('ul').findExclude('input','.potato');

More complex example found at http://jsfiddle.net/KX65p/3/ where I use this to .each() a nested class and bind elements which occur in each nested view to a class. This let me make components server-side and client-side reflect each other's properties and have cheaper nested event handling.

Implementation:

// Find-like method which masks any descendant
// branches matching the Mask argument.
$.fn.findExclude = function( Selector, Mask, result){

    // Default result to an empty jQuery object if not provided
    result = typeof result !== 'undefined' ?
                result :
                new jQuery();

    // Iterate through all children, except those match Mask
    this.children().each(function(){

        thisObject = jQuery( this );
        if( thisObject.is( Selector ) ) 
            result.push( this );

        // Recursively seek children without Mask
        if( !thisObject.is( Mask ) )
            thisObject.findExclude( Selector, Mask, result );
    });

    return result;
}

(Condensed Version):

$.fn.findExclude = function( selector, mask, result )
{
    result = typeof result !== 'undefined' ? result : new jQuery();
    this.children().each( function(){
        thisObject = jQuery( this );
        if( thisObject.is( selector ) ) 
            result.push( this );
        if( !thisObject.is( mask ) )
            thisObject.findExclude( selector, mask, result );
    });
    return result;
}