Wildcards in HTML5 data attributes

Question

Is it possible to find all DOM elements with jQuery with wildcards in the attribute name?

Consider the following HTML:

<input 
     id="val1" 
     type="text" 
     data-validate-required 
     data-validate-minlength="3" 
     data-validate-email />

What I am trying to achieve is to find all dom nodes with an attribute name starting with data-validate-

As far as I understand the wildcards described here are concerned with "value" of the attribute.

The reason for this is - I want to find out which elements should be validated at all - and afterwards find out which validation parameters (like -email) comes in play.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can create a custom pseudoclass to e.g. match attribute names against a regexp: http://jsfiddle.net/hN6vx/.

jQuery.expr.pseudos.attr = $.expr.createPseudo(function(arg) {
    var regexp = new RegExp(arg);
    return function(elem) {
        for(var i = 0; i < elem.attributes.length; i++) {
            var attr = elem.attributes[i];
            if(regexp.test(attr.name)) {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return false;
    };
});

Usage:

$(":attr('^data-')")

Answer 2

Because JQuery relies heavily on XPath, and XPath does not support wildcard attribute selection - it is not possible without the overhead you're looking to avoid.

There's always the possibility of creating your own selector, just to keep things clean:

//adds the :dataValidate selector
$.extend($.expr[':'],{
    dataValidate: function(obj){
        var i,dataAttrs=$(obj).data()
        for (i in dataAttrs) {
                if (i.substr(0,8)=='validate') return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
})

Which will allow you to use :dataValidate in your normal jQuery selectors:

$(".element:dataValidate .etc")

Working JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/rZXZ3/