Recursion of .children() to search for id attribute

I'm new to jQuery, familiar with PHP & CSS. I have nested, dynamically generated div's which I wish to send (the id's) to a server-side script to update numbers for. I want to check everything in the .content class. Only div's with id's should be sent for processing; however I'm having trouble making a recursive children() check...this is the best (non-recursively) I could do:

$(".content").children().each(function() {
    if ($(this).attr('id').length == 0) {
        $(this).children().each(function() {
            if ($(this).attr('id').length == 0) {
                $(this).children().each(function() {
                    if ($(this).attr('id').length == 0) {
                        $(this).children().each(function() {
                            alert($(this).attr('id'));
                        });
                    }
                });
            }
        });
    }
});

and it ju开发者_如何学JAVAst alert()'s the id's of everything at the level where they should be. There must be a better way to do this...thank you in advance for any advice. -Justin

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Try:

var ids = $('.content div[id]').map(function() {
    return this.id;
}).get();

.content div[id] will select you all div descendants (at any level) of .content with non-empty ID attributes. The [id] part is an example of the Has Attribute selector.

I have used .map. to extract the IDs of the matches, and .get() to convert the resulting object into a basic array.

Try it here: http://jsfiddle.net/M96yK/

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You can do:

$(".content div[id]");

This will return a jQuery object that contains all div's which have id's specified