search on 'id' which contains '/' + jquery

Question

I have DOM elements whose id may contain '/' in it. I want to use following formate, as I need all elements having the id for Ex:

jQuery('[id=activities/_terp_count]') //returns null 

Note that ,

jQuery('#activities/_terp_count') //returns null

Answer 1

The above solution works for me, but it's worth noting that there are advantages to the native method of getting an element by id: that is, document.getElementById('strin/g') will work here in cases where jQuery("strin/g") will fail (because jQuery uses a token parser that chokes on "/" without special treatment.escaping). To get the jQuery wrapped version of that element:

jQuery(document.getElementById('activities/_terp_count'));

In fact, if you can't always control exactly what's going into the actual id (say, if you're trying to search a page for an element with the id of something that was specified in the url #hash) then, a) be careful, because that can be dangerous and b) note that jQuery(document.getElementById(window.location.has.replace("#",''))); will work much more reliably than jQuery("#"+window.location.has.replace("#",'')); because it won't break as easily.

Example:

jQuery(document.getElementById("_=_")) //<--- null, or the actual element, if you have one which said crazy, non-compliant id

jQuery("#_=_") //<--Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: #_=_ 

If you don't want your users to be able to break your code just by entering in a particular url parameter or hash, avoid that use case if you can, and if you can't, use the native ID element.

Answer 2

jQuery('[id=activities/_terp_count]') should indeed find it (example - http://jsfiddle.net/jXsvA/), although it's going to be slower than a direct search by ID. It'll be faster if you can limit the selector some way, such as jQuery('div[id*=activities/_terp_count]') if you know the tags are always <div>'s for example.