Find an element in DOM based on an attribute value

Question

Can you please tell me if there is any DOM API which search for an element with given attribute name and attribute value:

Something like:

doc.findElementByAttribute("myAttribute", "aValue"); 

Answer 1

Modern browsers support native querySelectorAll so you can do:

document.querySelectorAll('[data-foo="value"]'); 

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document.querySelectorAll

Details about browser compatibility:

• http://quirksmode.org/dom/core/#t14
• http://caniuse.com/queryselector

You can use jQuery to support obsolete browsers (IE9 and older):

$('[data-foo="value"]'); 

Answer 2

Update: In the past few years the landscape has changed drastically. You can now reliably use querySelector and querySelectorAll, see Wojtek's answer for how to do this.

There's no need for a jQuery dependency now. If you're using jQuery, great...if you're not, you need not rely it on just for selecting elements by attributes anymore.

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There's not a very short way to do this in vanilla javascript, but there are some solutions available.

You do something like this, looping through elements and checking the attribute

If a library like jQuery is an option, you can do it a bit easier, like this:

$("[myAttribute=value]") 

If the value isn't a valid CSS identifier (it has spaces or punctuation in it, etc.), you need quotes around the value (they can be single or double):

$("[myAttribute='my value']") 

You can also do start-with, ends-with, contains, etc...there are several options for the attribute selector.