Please double check your selectors

http://jsfiddle.net/rwaldron/yfr8Z/3/

Your test case doesn't contain a list with sub lists though. Can I not use the eq selector to get items from the sub lists too?

Replying to [comment:2 Eric Lebetsamer <elebet@…>]:

Your test case doesn't contain a list with sub lists though. Can I not use the eq selector to get items from the sub lists too?

I have updated my test case to make it a bit more simple and to show that "$('a:eq(6)')" does not return the same as "$('a').eq(6)". Shouldn't these return the same thing? http://jsfiddle.net/yfr8Z/4/

Looks like a bug in Sizzle. Maybe uniqueSort should be applied earlier

simplified test case

#4641 is a duplicate of this ticket.

I think you're confusing how :eq and .eq() should operate.

$( 'ul.nav a:eq(6)' ) is essentially saying "get the 7th a element in ul.nav". But as sizzle goes through the dom, your first ul.nav element doesn't have 7 a elements, it only has 4 - thus you end up with the last one it could find.

$( 'ul.nav a' ) - now this gets all the a elements inside of a ul.nav ( 11 of them ) and .eq(6) gets the 7th one from that set.

Basically, it's an order of operations thing. .eq() is acting on the resulting set of objects, where as :eq() is working on that particular element. This is why $( 'a:eq(6)' ) and $( 'a' ).eq(6) both return the same element.

Also, eq is designed to retreive ONE element. So using it as a filter, for example, like $( 'ul.nav li a:eq(1)' ) and expecting it to get the 2nd a for every li isn't the expected behaviour. For that kind of operation, you'd want nth-child()

I'm marking it as needsdocs so that we can see about trying to address this in the documentation.

Hope this helps.

First attempt at condensing down the docs update required for this: http://api.jquery.com/eq-selector/