I\'m trying to select this element which has square brackets in the name attribute:
You can use backslash to quote "funny" characters in your jQuery selectors:
$('#input\\[23\\]')
For attribute values, you can use quotes:
$('input[name="weirdName[23]"]')
Now, I'm a little confused by your example; what exactly does your HTML look like? Where does the string "inputName" show up, in particular?
edit fixed bogosity; thanks @Dancrumb