jQuery select visual column in table with rowspan

Answer 1

If you want to support colspan and rowspan, then first you need to build table index, ie. matrix that identifies cell position in every row regardless of the markup. Then you need to track events of all the table cells and calculate their offset in the matrix and the columns that share the horizontal and vertical index.

This is the description of https://github.com/gajus/wholly, a plugin that I have developed for this purpose. Using the events you can find all the values in the row or in a col, including those attached using rowspan or solspan properties.

I made a visualisation illustrating a table and the events that are triggered upon navigation.

Orange is the active cell, red are the cells triggered by the vertical event and blue are the cells triggered by the horizontal event.