When do I need to escape metacharectars? (jQuery Selectors)

Question

According to the jQuery docs, I need to escape metacharacters that occur in my selector strings, when they occur as a literal. However, I couldn\'t find very many specific e

Answer 1

From the jQuery docs:

If you wish to use any of the meta-characters (#;&,.+*~':"!^$=>|/ ) as a literal part of a name, you must escape the character with two backslashes ...

All of these must be escaped:

1. id
2. class name
3. attribute name
4. attribute value
5. element name

The first four are obvious, and here's an example for the fifth. Element names in XML can contain a "." character for instance and still be valid.

John Doe

If you had to select all elements of user.name, then that . must be escaped

$(xml).find("user\\.name");