escape dot in javascript

Question

jQuery selector can't select an ID if it contains a . in it.
in my application ID name generates dynamically from usernames.

How can I escape any special character from tag IDs so that jQuery selector works well?

for example, ID1: This.Is.ID.1 ID2: This.is.Another.ID

Can anyone help me.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you want to modify a string that contains periods to have \\ in front of every period, to be supported as an id in the jQuery selector. Here is how to do that:

var username = 'some.username.with.dots';

// Replace all periods with \\. to 
username = username.replace(/\./g, '\\\\.');

// find element that matches #some\\.username\\.with\\.dots
$('#' + username).doSomethingWithjQuery();

• . means "any character" in regex, so you need to escape it by putting \ in front.
• The g regex modifier means greedy, without it the replace expression would only replace the first . with \\.

Edit I tried my code, and it seems like you need to change the replace value to \\\\. to make it become \\.