jquery find exception with contains selector

Question

I have some code running with jQuery 1.7.2 I encountered an error when trying to find using this selector

var x = "span:contains(\"C) Foo (Bar)\")";
$('body').find(x)

https://jsfiddle.net/elewinso/dfbn82wo/7/

This issue is fixed in JQuery 1.8 and up but since I cannot switch my jQuery I was hoping to find a patch.

Answer 1

The problem is your selector is confusing jQuery's parser because it contains brackets. It thinks the ) you are trying to match is the closing bracket of its contains: content filter.

You can get around this by using filter() instead.

$('span').filter(function() {
    return $(this).text().indexOf('"C) Foo (Bar)"') != -1;
});