CSS selector for text input fields?

Question

How can I target input fields of type \'text\' using CSS selectors?

Answer 1

As @Amir posted above, the best way nowadays – cross-browser and leaving behind IE6 – is to use

[type=text] {}

Nobody mentioned lower CSS specificity (why is that important?) so far, [type=text] features 0,0,1,0 instead of 0,0,1,1 with input[type=text].

Performance-wise there's no negative impact at all any more.

normalize v4.0.0 just released with lowered selector specificity.

Answer 2

I had input type text field in a table row field. I am targeting it with code

.admin_table input[type=text]:focus
{
    background-color: #FEE5AC;
}

Answer 3

You can use :text Selector to select all inputs with type text

Working Fiddle

$(document).ready(function () {
    $(":text").css({    //or $("input:text")
        'background': 'green',
        'color':'#fff'
    });
});

:text is a jQuery extension and not part of the CSS specification, queries using :text cannot take advantage of the performance boost provided by the native DOM querySelectorAll() method. For better performance in modern browsers, use [type="text"] instead. This will work for IE6+.

$("[type=text]").css({  // or $("input[type=text]")
    'background': 'green',
    'color':'#fff'
});

CSS

[type=text] // or input[type=text] 
{
    background: green;
}

Answer 4

input[type=text]

or, to restrict to text inputs inside forms

form input[type=text]

or, to restrict further to a certain form, assuming it has id myForm

#myForm input[type=text]

Notice: This is not supported by IE6, so if you want to develop for IE6 either use IE7.js (as Yi Jiang suggested) or start adding classes to all your text inputs.

Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html#attribute-selectors

---

Because it is specified that default attribute values may not always be selectable with attribute selectors, one could try to cover other cases of markup for which text inputs are rendered:

input:not([type]), // type attribute not present in markup
input[type=""], // type attribute present, but empty
input[type=text] // type is explicitly defined as 'text'

Still this leaves the case when the type is defined, but has an invalid value and that still falls back to type="text". To cover that we could use select all inputs that are not one of the other known types

input:not([type=button]):not([type=password]):not([type=submit])...

But this selector would be quite ridiculous and also the list of possible types is growing with new features being added to HTML.

Notice: the :not pseudo-class is only supported starting with IE9.

Answer 5

You can use the attribute selector here:

input[type="text"] {
    font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}

This is supported in IE7 and above. You can use IE7.js to add support for this if you need to support IE6.

See: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/attributeselector for more information

Answer 6

With attribute selector we target input type text in CSS

input[type=text] {
background:gold;
font-size:15px;
 }