Need to escape a special character in a jQuery selector string

Question

According to the selectors docs, you must escape [ with double backslash, etc \\[.

I have a selector that is created like so (assume val attribute is something[4][2] in this example).

var val = $(this).attr('val');             $select.find('option[value=' +  val + ']').show(); 

Can I write a regex to escape the brackets for me?

Answer 1

If you want something that works with any sort of value, try this:

var val = $(this).attr('val').replace(/[!"#$%&'()*+,.\/:;<=>?@[\\\]^`{|}~]/g, "\\\\$&") 

This works by escaping all CSS meta-characters listed on the Selectors page of the jQuery documentation with two backslashes.

Keep in mind that in your situation, there is no need to do something tricky like this. You can use the filter function to select all option elements with a given value without having to escape the value, as described in Mathias Bynens's answer.