Regular expression getElementById

Question

I need to use pure Javascript for the first time in a long while, and having gotten used to the comfy mattress of jQuery, all the important stuff is escaping me.

I n

Answer 1

This works by recursively traversing the whole DOM.

It's possibly not the most efficient, but should work on every browser.

function find_by_id(el, re, s) {

    s = s || [];
    if (el.tagName === 'DIV' && re.exec(el.id) !== null) {
        s.push(el);
    }

    var c = el.firstChild;
    while (c) {
        find_by_id(c, re, s);
        c = c.nextSibling;
    }

    return s;
}

var d = find_by_id(document.body, /^id_123456_/);

See http://jsfiddle.net/alnitak/fgSph/