Question

I am creating html element ids by escaping text phrases, as follows:

var elementid=escape('some term entered by user');

As a result, I have a span with an id as follows:

<span class="radio" id="selectTimescalesOne%20hello%20there" style="background-position: 0px 0px; "></span>

If I attempt this:

$('#selectTimescalesOne%20hello%20there').html('some new stuff');

Then the span does not get updated. Is there something wrong with using escaped strings as ids?

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/uSwEJ/

Answer 1

% is not valid in an id. You are limited to alphanumeric characters, _, - ‘:’ and ., although it is wise not to use the latter three, because they cannot be used in CSS selectors.

I really wouldn’t know why you want a user to input your id. Seems like bad design. If you do want to do this, just remove any invalid character or replace it with an underscore.