Question

I have a legacy PHP application which uses brackets in it’s naming of form elements e.g.

<select name="samplegroup[776]" id="samplegroup[776]">
<option value="1">1</option>
<option value="2" selected >2</option>
<option value="3">3</option>
</select>
<select name="samplegroup[883]" id="samplegroup[883]">
<option value="1">1</option>
<option value="2" selected >2</option>
<option value="3">3</option>
</select>

How can I match selects which have samplegroup followed by a number in brackets with jQuery? E.g. $("what_do_i_write_here")?

Answer 1

Using the attributeStartsWith selector:

$('select[name^="samplegroup"]')

It probably doesn’t matter that this is ignoring the number in square brackets part, unless you happen to also have other select elements that have a name starting with samplegroup.

http://jsfiddle.net/PbSVY/