Find the closest ancestor element that has a specific class

Use element.closest()

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/closest

See this example DOM:

<article>
  <div id="div-01">Here is div-01
    <div id="div-02">Here is div-02
      <div id="div-03">Here is div-03</div>
    </div>
  </div>
</article>

This is how you would use element.closest:

var el = document.getElementById('div-03');

var r1 = el.closest("#div-02");  
// returns the element with the id=div-02

var r2 = el.closest("div div");  
// returns the closest ancestor which is a div in div, here is div-03 itself

var r3 = el.closest("article > div");  
// returns the closest ancestor which is a div and has a parent article, here is div-01

var r4 = el.closest(":not(div)");
// returns the closest ancestor which is not a div, here is the outmost article

Update: Now supported in most major browsers

document.querySelector("p").closest(".near.ancestor")

Note that this can match selectors, not just classes

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.closest

---

For legacy browsers that do not support closest() but have matches() one can build selector-matching similar to @rvighne's class matching:

function findAncestor (el, sel) {
    while ((el = el.parentElement) && !((el.matches || el.matchesSelector).call(el,sel)));
    return el;
}

This does the trick:

function findAncestor (el, cls) {
    while ((el = el.parentElement) && !el.classList.contains(cls));
    return el;
}

The while loop waits until el has the desired class, and it sets el to el's parent every iteration so in the end, you have the ancestor with that class or null.

Here's a fiddle, if anyone wants to improve it. It won't work on old browsers (i.e. IE); see this compatibility table for classList. parentElement is used here because parentNode would involve more work to make sure that the node is an element.