jQuery matching ID with a ' = ' in it

Question

Hi all:

Has anyone tried matching an id with an equal sign (=) in it, and WORKED? E.g.:

// DOM structure
/*DOC += <span id='Test=Test' class='something'></span> */
var test = $('#Test=Test');

I tried the above code. jQuery doesn't like it and returned undefined. However if I match the span's class, I could actually find the span (and subsequently query the value of id).

If I have to match the id with '=' in it, are there any ways to do it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, at first I want to notice that the equal sign is not a valid character for the ID attribute, it can still be used, but you might have unexpected behavior between different browsers.

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

About jQuery, the = character on selectors must be escaped by a double back-slash:

$('#Test\\=Test');

More info:

• Special characters in selectors

The full list of characters that need to be escaped: #;&,.+*~':"!^$[]()=>|/