Find Active Tab using jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap

Question

I've been racking my brain for a little while now, and I would like to know if anyone out there knows how I can find the active tab, using jQuery and Twitter's Bootstrap. Pulling the hash from the URL is not my first option, I'm using the data-toggle attribute in the <a> link so there is no need to produce a URL hash.

Any insight? Here's an example of my markup:

<ul class="nav nav-list" id="sampleTabs">
    <li><a href="#example" data-toggle="tab">Tab 1</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="tab-content">
    <div class="tab-pane fade active in" id="example">
        Example Tab
    </div>
</div>

<script>
$('#sampleTabs a:first').tab('show');
</script>

I'm open to any suggestion - using a PHP session, JS cookie, etc.

Edit: This is the real issue. I have a pagination system using PHP, so when a page number or next/prev arrow is clicked, it will reload the page. This is why I need to find the active tab before loading the next page, since I"ll just pass it in the url or session, etc.

Answer 1

Twitter Bootstrap assigns the active class to the li element that represents the active tab:

$("ul#sampleTabs li.active")

An alternative is to bind the shown event of each tab, and save the active tab:

var activeTab = null;
$('a[data-toggle="tab"]').on('shown', function (e) {
  activeTab = e.target;
})