CSS, Selector, table

I have a HTML <table>.

I want to have columns 2 and 4 of that table be hidden b开发者_高级运维y CSS. Is there a method to have CSS detect the column number of a td element?

Use jQuery if you can:

$("table td:nth-child(2)").addClass("col2");
$("table td:nth-child(4)").addClass("col4");

CSS:

.col2, .col4 { display: none }

Some CSS 3 answers have been given. A CSS 2-compatible solution would be the following, assuming you can identify the table somehow (pretend it has the class "foo"):

table.foo > tbody > tr > td:first-class + td, /* column 2 */
table.foo > tbody > tr > td:first-class + td + td + td /* column 4 */
{display: none;}

Note that this doesn't select th elements or headings in thead or tfoot. You could copy the two selectors to read "th", but if you can trust the integrity of your markup to not have anything but th and td inside a tr and tr only in thead, tfoot, or tbody (the only valid possibilities); you could do something like this:

table.foo > * > tr > :first-class + *, /* column 2 */
table.foo > * > tr > :first-class + * + * + * /* column 4 */
{display: none;}

This works fine in browsers newer than IE6, generally, which is almost always acceptable.

If IE6 support is mandatory -- and be utterly sure it is before bothering to go down this road -- a combination of valid CSS2/3 and Javascript in a conditional comment is the simplest solution (avoid using Javascript for layout when the job doesn't require it).

Add classes to the appropriate rows, and then you can use that to hide those rows.

There are nth-child selectors, but those will only work on more recent browsers.

Take a look at the nth-child and nth-of-type psudo classes.

Something like

td:nth-of-type(2) { visible: false; }
td:nth-of-type(4) { visible: false; }

You can do that with CSS 3 selectors - specifically :nth-child. Note that this solution won't work on most browsers at present (it basically only works properly in Firefox 3.1b and higher).

If you don't have access to change the classes, and you can't use JavaScript, then I'm afraid you're out of luck.

You can, but since that is CSS3, it won't work on IE and older versions of Firefox and some other browsers. Check out :nth-child.

IMHO, the best you could do is add a class to each row you want to target.

Tanks to everybody, I had to use jquery, I could not find how to do that from pure CSS2 , IE doesn't support CSS3 :(