Question

I was wondering if there’s a way to select an item (div,span,whatever..) using javascript with jQuery (+ jQuery UI lib) based on its data attribute value. For example, let’s say I have:

<div class="b">Hi</div>

I then assign some data to it:

$('.b').data('myKey', 1234);

Then, I want to find a div (or multiple divs that) satisfy condition myKey = 1234 .
For example, like this:

var resultingElement = $('.b:data(myKey=1234)');

Is it possible by default, or do I have to implement this kind of selector myself?
And no, I don’t want to use HTML5’s visible data-* attributes for this.

Answer 1

You can create a custom pseudo-selector to make things easy: http://jsfiddle.net/g2xKB/1/.

$.expr.pseudos.data = $.expr.createPseudo(function(args) {
    var items = args.split(",");  // the arguments (key, value)

    $.each(items, function(i, item) {
        item = item.trim();
        var isString = /^['"]|['"]$/.test(item);
        item = item.replace(/^['"]|['"]$/g, "");  // remove quotes

        if(!isString) {
            item = +item;  // if no quotes, it's a number
        }

        items[i] = item;
    });

    return function(elem) {
        return $.data(elem, items[0]) === items[1];
    }
});

You can then use it as follows:

$(".b:data('myKey', 1234)").css("color", "red");