Hide/Show Column in an HTML Table

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.

I would like to do this without attaching a class to every td

Personally, I would go with the the class-on-each-td/th/col approach. Then you can switch columns on and off using a single write to className on the container, assuming style rules like:

table.hide1 .col1 { display: none; }
table.hide2 .col2 { display: none; }
...

This is going to be faster than any JS loop approach; for really long tables it can make a significant difference to responsiveness.

If you can get away with not supporting IE6, you could use adjacency selectors to avoid having to add the class attributes to tds. Or alternatively, if your concern is making the markup cleaner, you could add them from JavaScript automatically in an initialisation step.

you could use colgroups:

<table>
    <colgroup>
       <col class="visible_class"/>
       <col class="visible_class"/>
       <col class="invisible_class"/>  
    </colgroup>
    <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>

your script then could change just the desire <col> class.