Posted in: Using jQuery Core > Frequently Asked Questions

How do I select an element by an ID that has characters used in CSS notation?

Because jQuery uses CSS syntax for selecting elements, some characters are interpreted as CSS notation. In order to tell jQuery to treat these characters literally rather than as CSS notation, they must be escaped by placing two backslashes in front of them.

See the Selector documentation for further details.

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// Does not work:
$( "#some:id" )
// Works!
$( "#some\\:id" )
// Does not work:
$( "#some.id" )
// Works!
$( "#some\\.id" )

The following function takes care of escaping these characters and places a "#" at the beginning of the ID string:

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function jq( myid ) {
return "#" + myid.replace( /(:|\.|\[|\]|,|=|@)/g, "\\$1" );
}

The function can be used like so:

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$( jq( "some.id" ) )