Hide/Show Column in an HTML Table

Question

I have an HTML table with several columns and I need to implement a column chooser using jquery. When a user clicks on a checkbox I want to hide/show the corresponding column in the table. I would like to do this without attaching a class to every td in the table, is there a way to select an entire column using jquery? Below is an example of the HTML.

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr><th class="col1">Header 1</th><th class="col2">Header 2</th><th class="col3">Header 3</th></tr>
    </thead>
    <tr><td>Column1</td><td>Column2</td><td>Column3</td></tr>
    <tr><td>Column1</td><td>Column2</td><td>Column3</td></tr>
    <tr><td>Column1</td><td>Column2</td><td>Column3</td></tr>
    <tr><td>Column1</td><td>Column2</td><td>Column3</td></tr>
</table>

<form>
    <input type="checkbox" name="col1" checked="checked" /> Hide/Show Column 1 <br />
    <input type="checkbox" name="col2" checked="checked" /> Hide/Show Column 2 <br />
    <input type="checkbox" name="col3" checked="checked" /> Hide/Show Column 3 <br />
</form>

Answer 1

One line of code using jQuery which hides the 2nd column:

$('td:nth-child(2)').hide();

If your table has header(th), use this:

$('td:nth-child(2),th:nth-child(2)').hide();

Source: Hide a Table Column with a Single line of jQuery code

jsFiddle to test the code: http://jsfiddle.net/mgMem/1/

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If you want to see a good use case, take a look at my blog post:

Hide a table column and colorize rows based on value with jQuery.