jQuery 1.7 selector error

Question

this is my very first question.

I'm working on a fully Ajax system with jQuery, and it works fine with 1.6.2. When I tried to upgrade it to 1.7, this piece of code stopped working properly:

$("a[class!='']").live("click",function(e){
    e.preventDefault();
});

In 1.6.2, it prevents all hyperlink tags from working as a link if they have a class, but in 1.7 it stopped ALL links from working as real links, even those without classes.

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/hBehg/

Answer 1

Use $('a[class]'), this will select all elements which have the class attribute. As I said in my comment, checking for an empty value might not work if the element does not even have a class attribute.

Update: As pointed out by @Sidnicious, the documentation describes that this selector will also select those elements which do not have that attribute. If it didn't in 1.6, then it actually must have been a bug in that version, or they changed the description without mentioning it.

Of course, if you indeed have an empty class attribute, i.e. <a class="">, this will not work.

DEMO

Update 2: As @lonesomeday mentions in his comment, $('a[class][class!=""]') does work as you intended with $(a[class!=""]).

As others said, you can change to on in jQuery 1.7, which unifies the event handling methods, but it won't solve your particular problem.

Answer 2

The jQuery docs describe the [name!=value] selector like this:

Select elements that either don't have the specified attribute, or do have the specified attribute but not with a certain value.

In your case, it will select every a which doesn’t have a class or whose class is not equal to an empty string. <a></a> and <a class=""></a> are not the same.

That might actually have been a bug in jQuery 1.6!