JQuery certainly saves a lot of hassle when it comes to writing JavaScript. On a recent project I’ve been struggling to get my head around some selectors to try and grab the elements I need. Along the way I found there’s a lot of power in the selector and I managed to get just what I needed. I have a lot of form elements all with very common id’s I didn’t want to put id after id into the selector and found you could use a regular expression type of selector. I wanted to select all text inputs with an id beginning with ‘am’ or ‘pm’. My solution:
$('input[type="text"][id^=am],input[type="text"][id^=pm]')...The important bits are ^= and the comma. [id^=X] fetches where the id begins with X and [id$=X] would fetch those ending in X. The comma was the all important OR part for me. So one selector selects the matching expressions as an OR.