Question

I have some DIVs with ID “div1”, “div2” … “divx”. I want to perform an operation on them. Is there any way to get the element ID .contains “div”. Any other idea?

Answer 1

You can use the starts with selector

$("div[id^='div']")

The above will grab all divs that have an id attribute that begins with the letters div.

jsFiddle example that makes all divs with id div... invisible.

---

Here’s how to handle the trickier case if you want to match div followed by a number but not div followed by something else. So div1 would match, but divx would not.

In this case we use filter() with a function. The function should return true for when we want a match and false for when we do not. match() and a regex is great for this (you can use [0-9] to represent a digit in a regex or the simpler [\d]):

$("div").filter(function() {
    return $(this).attr("id").match(/^div[\d]+$/)
})

attr() returns the value of the specified attribute, in this case id.

jsFiddle example that makes all div followed by number disappear, but not div followed by other things.