How to get absolute DOM path of html element

Question

I'm having problems with html DOM.

How do I get the value from this path:

html body div table tbody tr td table tbody tr td table tbody tr td table tbody tr td form table tbody tr td

I can only find stuff like getElementbyID/tag/name/class etc.

How do I get the absolute DOM 'path' of the td element (let's say the 3rd cell of the second row in that table)? I've been looking everywhere but cannot find a simple answer without ID/Class etc involved.

Solution

You could use querySelector(), but it doesn't have great support...

var elem = document.querySelector('html body div table tbody tr td table tbody tr td table tbody tr td table tbody tr td form table tbody tr td');

Otherwise just use a library that allows you to use CSS selectors, such as jQuery.

var $elem = $('html body div table tbody tr td table tbody tr td table tbody tr td table tbody tr td form table tbody tr td');

By the way, selecting like this is horrible for performance. Absolutely terrible. Have a read up on CSS selectors to learn why.