Question

I have a table column I’m trying to expand and hide. jQuery seems to hide the <td> elements when I select it by class but not by the element’s name.

For example:

$(".bold").hide(); // Selecting by class works.
$("tcol1").hide(); // Selecting by name does not work.

Note the HTML below. The second column has the same name for all rows. How could I create this collection using the name attribute?

<tr>
  <td>data1</td>
  <td name="tcol1" class="bold"> data2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td>data1</td>
  <td name="tcol1" class="bold"> data2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td>data1</td>
  <td name="tcol1" class="bold"> data2</td>
</tr>

Answer 1

You can use the jQuery attribute selector:

$('td[name="tcol1"]')   // Matches exactly 'tcol1'
$('td[name^="tcol"]' )  // Matches those that begin with 'tcol'
$('td[name$="tcol"]' )  // Matches those that end with 'tcol'
$('td[name*="tcol"]' )  // Matches those that contain 'tcol'