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Escape jQuery selectors

I've started to play with jQuery and needed an easy way to escape my selectors in situations when they're out of my control. A function like this will get the job done.

function escapeExpression(str) {
    return str.replace(/([#;&,\.\+\*\~':"\!\^$\[\]\(\)=>\|])/g, "\\$1");
}

Reader comments

  1. Mark

    I've been looking for this, thank you! Everyone was suggesting using consecutive replace() on the same string and I just didn't like the idea.

    1st October 2009, 18:57 CET. 

  2. Filipus Klutiero

    I'm adopting this after adding the backslash to metacharacters. Note that I'm wondering why the slash isn't escaped even if it's described as a meta-character on http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/
    It's not clear why it's a metacharacter though (as for &).

    I would show the result, but your blog is stripping backslashes.

    12th February 2010, 07:05 CET. 

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About this post

Created 3rd September 2009 14:57 CET. Filed under jQuery, Javascript and DOM.

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