How to tell jQuery to stop searching DOM when the first element is found?

Question

From what I understand, adding .first() or :first to a query doesn\'t stop DOM search after the first match. It just tells jQuery to take 1st eleme

Answer 1

:first matches only a single element. its equivalent to :eq(0).

.first() reduces the set of matched elements to the first in the set.

so using :first would seem like its what you need, but on looking closer they're both using selectors first to find a set and then going on to use the first.

There's some comments and discussion here and here that seems to indicate that :first() doesn't stop at the first element.

References:

http://api.jquery.com/first-selector/

http://api.jquery.com/first/