Question

I just asked a question here about selecting all id’s of the form id_* where * is any string and id is the id of the element. I got a great working solution:

$("*[id^=" + id + "_]").each(function() {... // id is the element name

I need to take this one step further now:
All of my ids will be of the form: a_b_c ... where a b and c are arbitrarity strings (that do NOT contain a ‘‘). So, now rather than selecting all the elems of the form id_* where * could be a_b_c ... I need only to select 1 level deep: i.e. all elems of the form id_a. So in other words it stops at the next ‘‘. Is this possible?

As an example:

If my id is: first
And there exist id’s: first_second, first_second_third
It will select only first_second

Answer 1

What I ended up doing (and I’m open to faster implementations) is:

$("*[id^=" + id + "_]").each(function() {
   //here I simply split the id and test the size of the array
   //if its too large (i.e. too deep in the tree), I return true (to continue
   //  to the next iteration):

   var row = $(this);
   var split = row.attr('id').split("_");

   if(split.length > SOME_PREDETERMINED_VAL)
      return true;

   //code here
});

I am not totally happy with this since it still traverses all elements (or would it do this anyway regardless of the filter in the each() function??).