CSS selector for attribute names based on a wildcard

Question

I've recently been doing a little studying on CSS selectors and have run into a question regarding the new "data-*" attributes.

I understand that in order to select elements with a data attribute there are a few ways of going about it:

[data-something='value']{...}    // data-something has value = 'value' [data-something^='value']{...}   // data-something has value that STARTS with 'value' [data-something*='value']{...}   // data-something has value with 'value SOMEWHERE in it 

There are other variations of these, but my question pertains to CSS selectors that can target elements that simply HAVE a "data" attribute. More specifically, is there a CSS selector that can target elements that have ANY "data" attribute at all?

While incorrect, I'm thinking of something like:

[data]{...} 

I've been searching through Google but haven't found anything regarding a generic selector for the attribute yet.

Answer 1

As you have pointed out, there are multiple ways to target the value of an HTML attribute.

• E[foo="bar"]

  an E element whose "foo" attribute value is exactly equal to "bar"

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• E[foo~="bar"]

  an E element whose "foo" attribute value is a list of whitespace-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to "bar"

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• E[foo^="bar"]

  an E element whose "foo" attribute value begins exactly with the string "bar"

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• E[foo$="bar"]

  an E element whose "foo" attribute value ends exactly with the string "bar"

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• E[foo*="bar"]

  an E element whose "foo" attribute value contains the substring "bar"

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• E[foo|="en"]

  an E element whose "foo" attribute has a hyphen-separated list of values beginning (from the left) with "en"

But there is only one way to target the attribute name itself:

• E[foo]

  an E element with a "foo" attribute

Hence, there are currently no methods for wildcarding attribute names:

div[data-*] { ... } /* may be useful, but doesn't exist */ div[data-^] { ... } /* may be useful, but doesn't exist */ 

_{source: W3C Selectors Level 3 Specification}

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From another answer to a similar question:

There is a recent thread in the [email protected] mailing list, where Simon Pieters from Opera has proposed a nice possible syntax that has got some acceptance in the thread, so there is a chance that it will become standard somewhen in the future:

x-admin-* { ... } [data-my-*] { ... } 

Answer 2

No, there is no wildcarding for attribute names in CSS selectors. All attribute selectors contain a specific name of an attribute.