:contain / start by

Question

Is there a "start by" filter in jQuery, something like :contain but with a string beginning condition ?

Answer 1

I think you can use

indexOf function in javascript

var str = "test string print";

str.indexOf ( "test" ) returns 0

and

str.indexOf ( "print" ) returns 12

So you can check for the return value of indexOf function and if it is 0 then it is at the start position.

Answer 2

Start With: ^=

The ^= operator will filter elements whose attribute starts with the given value.

More info here:

http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1003-Cool-jQuery-Predicate-Selectors.htm

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/897025/jquery-return-elements-where-id-begins-with-a-certain-string

Answer 3

Not that I know of, but you can easily implement your own selector for jQuery:

$.extend($.expr[':'], {
    startsWith: function(elem,match) {  
        return (elem.textContent || elem.innerText || "").indexOf(match[3]) == 0;
    }  
});

Now you can use it like this:

$("p:startsWith(Hello)").css("color","red")

Answer 4

No, but you can do it yourself using filter, as pulse suggested:

$('a').filter(function(){
    return $(this).text().indexOf('start') == 0 }
)

You may want to use a regular expression here, to ignore case, or for more advanced searches:

$('a').filter(function(){
    return $(this).text().match(/^start/i) }
)