Question

I noticed that some validation tools use the “class” attribute to pass options to validation scripts.

Example:

<input class="input-field validate[required, email]" name="" type="text" />

the “required” and “email” would be picked up by the script as setting options.

I was wondering is there an easy way to achieve this or maybe this is already available in jQuery?
I want to use this as a means of passing certain settings to my script.

Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks

Edit:

Thanks @loseb your example works great.
Another thing I am trying to achieve by doing some small modification to your example:

function classAttributes( classString, className ) {
    var data;
    var regex = new RegExp(className+"\[(.*?)\]");
    var matches = classString.match(regex);

    if ( matches ) {
        //matches[1] refers to options inside [] "required, email, ..."
            var spec = matches[1].split(/,\s*/);

            if ( spec.length > 0 ) {
                data = spec;
            }
    }

    return data;
}

any idea why “new RegExp(className+”[(.*?)]”);” doesnt work. var matches is blank.

Edit:
second part of the question moved to:
javascript regex pattern with a variable string not working

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly this is the solution:

var className = $('.input-field').att('class');
var regex = /validate\[(.*?)\]/;
var matches = className.match(regex);

if (matches) {
    //matches[1] refers to "required, email" string
    var spec = matches[1].split(/,\s*/);

    if (spec.length == 2) {
        var attribute = spec[0]; //required or optional or anything else
        var validator = spec[1]; //actual validation type
    }
}