Question

I have the following HTML:

<form name="frmSave">...</form>

Just to know, I am not able to modify the HTML in order to add an id or something else.

This is what I tried to get the form element by it’s name:

var frm = $('form[name="frmSave"]');

console.log(frm);

(but I believe the above code will try to get a children element with the frmSave name inside the form which is not what I need).

How can I achieve this, is it possible to get the form by just the name and using a selector?

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Update:

I was doing the wrong way in my original code (I was using a space aka “combinator” in the selector) and not in the code snippet from here so jQuery was trying to get any children element with the name needed and I was asking myself what was wrong since nothing was returned.

The accepted answer gives a better explanation about this so a little space could change everything – I will sleep properly next time 🙂

Answer 1

$('form[name="frmSave"]') is correct. You mentioned you thought this would get all children with the name frmsave inside the form; this would only happen if there was a space or other combinator between the form and the selector, eg: $('form [name="frmSave"]');

$('form[name="frmSave"]') literally means find all forms with the name frmSave, because there is no combinator involved.