Find DOM element by ID when ID contains square brackets?

I have a DOM element with an ID similar to:

something[500]

which was built by my Ruby on Rails application. I need to be able to get this element via jQuery so that I can traverse my way up the DOM to delete the parent of it's parent, which has a variable ID that I don't have access to beforehand.

Does anyone know how I could go about this? The following code doesn't seem to be working:

alert($("#something["+id+"]").parent().parent().attr("id"));

Upon further inspection, the following:

$("#something["+id+"]")

returns an object, but when I run ".html()" or ".text()" on it, the result is always null or just an empty string.

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You need to escape the square brackets so that they are not counted as attribute selectors. Try this:

alert($("#something\\["+id+"\\]").parent().parent().attr("id"));

See Special Characters In Selectors, specifically the second paragraph:

To use any of the meta-characters (such as !"#$%&'()*+,./:;<=>?@[\]^``{|}~) as a literal part of a name, it must be escaped with with two backslashes: \\. For example, an element with id="foo.bar", can use the selector $("#foo\\.bar"). The W3C CSS specification contains the complete set of rules regarding valid CSS selectors. Also useful is the blog entry by Mathias Bynens on CSS character escape sequences for identifiers.

answered 2009-08-06T14:09:19.450

Find DOM element by ID when ID contains square brackets?

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