Question

how can you put a user-defined attribute on a html element and then find the element with jquery?

var btn_edit = $('<input class="my_class" userattribute="test" type="button" value="edit" />');

have read about something i CSS where you can do something like this

.my_class[userattribute='test']{

}

Answer 1

You can retrieve it with the attr() method like this:

btn_edit.attr('userattribute')

example: http://jsfiddle.net/niklasvh/59SQC/

Note that if you are gonna be using your own custom attributes, you should prepend them with data-

edit

You can find the element which has it set using:

$('*[userattribute]');

and get the value of it:

$('*[userattribute]').attr('userattribute')

example: http://jsfiddle.net/niklasvh/2n2hb/

and if you want to select the elements with the attribute set to a specific value:

$('*[userattribute="test"]').attr('userattribute')