jQuery selector regular expressions

James Padolsey created a wonderful filter that allows regex to be used for selection.

Say you have the following div:

<div class="asdf">

Padolsey's :regex filter can select it like so:

$("div:regex(class, .*sd.*)")

Also, check the official documentation on selectors.

You can use the filter function to apply more complicated regex matching.

Here's an example which would just match the first three divs:

$('div')
  .filter(function() {
    return this.id.match(/abc+d/);
  })
  .html("Matched!");

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<div id="abcd">Not matched</div>
<div id="abccd">Not matched</div>
<div id="abcccd">Not matched</div>
<div id="abd">Not matched</div>

These can be helpful.

If you're finding by Contains then it'll be like this

    $("input[id*='DiscountType']").each(function (i, el) {
         //It'll be an array of elements
     });

If you're finding by Starts With then it'll be like this

    $("input[id^='DiscountType']").each(function (i, el) {
         //It'll be an array of elements
     });

If you're finding by Ends With then it'll be like this

     $("input[id$='DiscountType']").each(function (i, el) {
         //It'll be an array of elements
     });

If you want to select elements which id is not a given string

    $("input[id!='DiscountType']").each(function (i, el) {
         //It'll be an array of elements
     });

If you want to select elements which name contains a given word, delimited by spaces

     $("input[name~='DiscountType']").each(function (i, el) {
         //It'll be an array of elements
     });

If you want to select elements which id is equal to a given string or starting with that string followed by a hyphen

     $("input[id|='DiscountType']").each(function (i, el) {
         //It'll be an array of elements
     });

If your use of regular expression is limited to test if an attribut start with a certain string, you can use the ^ JQuery selector.

For example if your want to only select div with id starting with "abc", you can use:

$("div[id^='abc']")

A lot of very useful selectors to avoid use of regex can be find here: http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/attribute-selectors/

var test = $('#id').attr('value').match(/[^a-z0-9 ]+/);

Here you go!

Add a jQuery function,

(function($){
    $.fn.regex = function(pattern, fn, fn_a){
        var fn = fn || $.fn.text;
        return this.filter(function() {
            return pattern.test(fn.apply($(this), fn_a));
        });
    };
})(jQuery);

Then,

$('span').regex(/Sent/)

will select all span elements with text matches /Sent/.

$('span').regex(/tooltip.year/, $.fn.attr, ['class'])

will select all span elements with their classes match /tooltip.year/.

ids and classes are still attributes, so you can apply a regexp attribute filter to them if you select accordingly. Read more here: http://rosshawkins.net/archive/2011/10/14/jquery-wildcard-selectors-some-simple-examples.aspx

$("input[name='option[colour]'] :checked ")

If you just want to select elements that contain given string then you can use following selector:

$(':contains("search string")')

I'm just giving my real time example:

In native javascript I used following snippet to find the elements with ids starts with "select2-qownerName_select-result".

document.querySelectorAll("[id^='select2-qownerName_select-result']");

When we shifted from javascript to jQuery we've replaced above snippet with the following which involves less code changes without disturbing the logic.

$("[id^='select2-qownerName_select-result']")