How to Select Nth Child of Specific Tag with CSS

How to select nth child of specific tag with css?

I'd suggest:

form p:nth-of-type(4) {
    display: none;
}

JS Fiddle demo.

This will hide the fourth p element, rather than the fourth-child (which is important as, in your HTML, the p is the fifth-child).

And, just to demonstrate why :nth-child() is the wrong selector, here's a demo showing the use of p:nth-child(4): JS Fiddle demo.

Incidentally, if that's the only element that contains a label (which, given that the elements are nested within a form seems an unlikely assumption), you could also use IE-friendly selectors:

p {
    /* removes the visible-space left by empty p elements */
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
}

p > label {
    /* hides the label element, and its contents */
    display: none;
}

JS Fiddle demo.

References:

• :nth-of-type().

How do I select nth element in a given set

Use the nth-child selector:

span:nth-child(2) {}

This selects the first span since it's the second child. If you want to select the second span, you can use this instead:

span:nth-of-type(2) {}

You can also use first-child, last-child, nth-child(odd) or nth-child(even), among others.

Can one use CSS :nth-child (or similar) to select batches of elements in HTML, e.g every other 4 nodes?

Yes, you can use a group of nth-child selectors like in the below snippet to select a repeating group of elements based on a pattern.

One thing to note is that selecting every 4th element and the next 4 after it is equivalent to selecting all elements after the 4th element and hence I have restricted the sample to just the next 2 elements.

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Explanation of the selector (selects 4th, 5th, 8th, 9th elements and so on):

• nth-child(4n+4) - selects 4th (4*0 + 4), 8th (4*1 + 4), 12th (4*2 +4) elements
• nth-child(4n+5) - selects 5th (4*0 + 5), 9th (4*1 + 5), 13th (4*2 + 5) elements.

As you can see from the explanation, the series starts from the 4th element and repeats from then on. If your need is to start with the series from the 1st element (say 1st, 2nd, 5th, 6th etc) then you could use the selector group as div:nth-child(4n+1), div:nth-child(4n+2).

div:nth-child(4n+4), div:nth-child(4n+5){  color: red;}

<div>1</div><div>2</div><div>3</div><div>4</div><div>5</div><div>6</div><div>7</div><div>8</div><div>9</div><div>10</div><div>11</div><div>12</div><div>13</div><div>14</div><div>15</div><div>16</div>

nth-child not targeting the correct element?

It's because the nth-child selector does not mean it's the nth of that specific class. It means that it's the nth sibling overall.

So the nth-child(2) refers to your .reuinIt class, however, it does not also have the .test class and therefore it does not receive any styling.

Your last .test class is the nth-child(4) however that has no styling rules applied.

If you'd like to see a working example, I've updated your fiddle here.

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EXAMPLES

The :nth-child

The important thing to remember here is that the :nth-child selector specifically targets HTML elements based on their index/position inside their containers/parent elements.

Have a look at the example below and take note of how the corresponding commented :nth-child selector's index continues to increment regardless of the type of element it's targeting.

<div id="container">
    <h1>Heading 1</h1>   <!-- h1:nth-child(1) -->
    <p>Paragraph 1</p>   <!-- p:nth-child(2)  -->
    <p>Paragraph 2</p>   <!-- p:nth-child(3)  -->
    <h2>Heading 2</h2>   <!-- h2:nth-child(4) -->
    <p>Paragraph 3</p>   <!-- p:nth-child(5)  -->
</div>

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The :nth-of-type

The cool thing about :nth-of-type is that it ignores all of the other elements that are not of the same type, i.e. if the element you are targeting is a <p>, it will ignore all of the surrounding "non-<p>" elements when calculating its index.

The below example will provide you with a basic understanding of the indexing rules that :nth-of-type follows:

<div id="container">
    <h1>Heading 1</h1>   <!-- h1:nth-of-type(1) -->
    <p>Paragraph 1</p>   <!-- p:nth-of-type(1)  -->
    <p>Paragraph 2</p>   <!-- p:nth-of-type(2)  -->
    <h2>Heading 2</h2>   <!-- h2:nth-of-type(1) -->
    <p>Paragraph 3</p>   <!-- p:nth-of-type(3)  -->
</div>

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A little more complexity with :nth-of-type

It is however very important to remember that :nth-of-type bases it's indexing values on the HTML Element Type regardless of the CSS Class you are using to call the property.

Have a look at the below example:

<div id="container">
    <h1>Heading 1</h1>                    <!--        h1:nth-of-type(1) -->
    <p class="my-class">Paragraph 1</p>   <!-- .my-class:nth-of-type(1) -->
    <p>Paragraph 2</p>                    <!--         p:nth-of-type(2) -->
    <h2 class="my-class">Heading 2</h2>   <!-- .my-class:nth-of-type(1) -->
    <p class="my-class">Paragraph 3</p>   <!-- .my-class:nth-of-type(3) -->
    <h1 class="my-class">Heading 3</h1>   <!-- .my-class:nth-of-type(2) -->
</div>

This example is a little more complex, but it helps if you see CSS Declarations as a sort of filtering rule. For example, if create a CSS declaration by typing:

p:nth-of-type(2) {
  background-color: red;
}

I am essentially telling the browser 2 things:

1. Only <p> tags should be affected and,
2. Only if they are the second <p> tags amidst their siblings

The difficulty comes in when I write CSS that looks like this:

.my-class:nth-of-type(1) {
  background-color: red;
}

By not specifying an element type, my rule essentially reads with the following filter:

1. Only elements with the class my-class should be affected and,
2. Only if those elements are the first sibling of their type of elements.

If were to apply the above CSS to the HTML in the example (see fiddle for working example), we would get an output that looks like this:

In the output above, you'll see that both the first <h2> and the first <p> elements were affected regardless of whether or not their siblings had the my-class class name applied.

:nth-child related only to specific class or element

p:nth-of-type(3) {
    background-color:red;
}

Will select only third <p> element :) , was this your question ?

see http://www.w3.org/wiki/CSS/Selectors/pseudo-classes/:nth-of-type
your example : http://codepen.io/anon/pen/DxGos

nth-child() selector working only on select few elements

nth child, as explained here selects based on elements that are the nth child of their parents.

so 1 is working, because the first stroke is the first child.
3 works because the second stroke is the third child.
2 won't work, because there are no strokes that are 2nd children, just h2

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