jQuery selector that simulates :starts-with or :ends-with for searching text?

Question

If you look at the selectors list on the jQuery website, there are selectors for starts-with and ends-with on attributes. There's also a :contains selector for searching text:

alert( $("div").find("span:contains(text)").html() );

Does jQuery have an implementation for searching strings using starts-with or ends-with?

FYI: I need to search through an XML object.

Answer 1

Not by default as far as I know, but you can add your own pseudo-selectors through $.expr[":"]: http://jsfiddle.net/h6KYk/.

$.extend($.expr[":"], {
    "starts-with": function(elem, i, data, set) {
        var text = $.trim($(elem).text()),
            term = data[3];

        // first index is 0
        return text.indexOf(term) === 0;
    },

    "ends-with": function(elem, i, data, set) {
        var text = $.trim($(elem).text()),
            term = data[3];

        // last index is last possible
        return text.lastIndexOf(term) === text.length - term.length;
    }
});

Answer 2

When you don't want to extend jQuery, you can use the filter() function to create the contains functionality:

$("div").find("span").filter(function () {
    return $(this).text().indexOf(text) >= 0;
});

Or create a startsWith function with a regular expression:

var expression = new RegExp('^' + text);
$("div").find("span").filter(function () {
    return expression.test($.trim($(this).text()));
});

The endsWith function is quite similar:

var expression = new RegExp(text + '$');
$("div").find("span").filter(function () {
    return expression.test($.trim($(this).text()));
});

Note the use of $.trim() because HTML can contain a lot of whitespace.