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Pseduo-RegEx JQuery Selectors

More often than not I find myself using only few jQuery selectors to locate elements in DOM for event binding; however, jQuery also offers some powerful psedo-RegEx selectors for locating elements.

Say, you have the following HTML5 markup:

--------------------------------------------------
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>JQuery Selector</title>
</head>
<body>
    <article class="post-article">
        <header class="article-header"></header>
        <p class="article-content"></p>
    </article>
</body>
</html>
--------------------------------------------------

You can use the following selectors to locate the "article-header" element.

1- Using closest 
   $(".post-article").closest("header").first()

2- If DOM is properly ordered
 $(".post-article").firstChild()

3- Using psedo-RegEx expressions
The general parttern for using psedo-RegEx expressions is as follows:

$("[atttr{selectorExpression}{selectorText}]")

Where:

attr - Is the attribute of the DOM element (e.g class, id, style, name, etc...)
selectorExpression - Is the RegEx expression (e.g. ^ for starts with, ~ for contains, ! for not)
selectorText - is the text that is used in the DOM element

Using the example above:

To select the "article-header" element you can use the "equals to" selector as follows:

$("[class=article-header]")

or if the class name starts with "article-header," you can use the "starts with" operator as follows:

$("[class^=article-header]") or  $("[class~=article-header]") for contains operator.

Alternatively, if you are only interested in elements other than the "article-header" element. You can use the "not" operator as follows.

$("[class!=article-header]")

Here is a complete list of jQuery selectors:









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