It's an attribute selector which matches any img
tag class text including "align". For instance, it would match any of the following:
<img class="dummy align test" />
<img class="test align-1" />
<img class="hello-align" />
<img class="abaligncd" />
<img class="align" />
From the documentation (linked above):
E[foo*="bar"] - an E element whose "foo" attribute value contains the substring "bar"
This is used in popular CSS frameworks to style multiple similar classes without having to add a new identical class to each. For instance, if we had the following markup:
<p class="central para-red">Hello, world!</p>
<p class="para-green bold">Hello, world!</p>
<p class="para-blue">Hello, world!</p>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
We could apply styling to all of the p
elements whose class contains "para-" without having to manually type all the variations by simply using:
p[class*="para-"] { ... }
Here is a JSFiddle example of this in use.