Question

I’m trying to use jQuery to identify <td> elements which contain specific HTML comment text. The standard ‘:contains’ selector doesn’t seem to be looking into the comments. My context here is that I want to dynamically add some content to that same td element. Here’s a sample of the target td:

<TD valign='top' class='ms-formbody' width='400px'>         <!-- FieldName='Title'              FieldInternalName='Title'              FieldType='SPFieldText'           -->             <span dir='none'>         <input name='ctl00$m$g_0b1e4ca3_9450_4f3e_b3af_8134fe014ea5$ctl00$ctl04$ctl00$ctl00$ctl00$ctl04$ctl00$ctl00$TextField' type='text' maxlength='255' id='ctl00_m_g_0b1e4ca3_9450_4f3e_b3af_8134fe014ea5_ctl00_ctl04_ctl00_ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_ctl00_ctl00_TextField' title='Title' class='ms-long' /><br>     </span>           </TD> 

This html is generated by SharePoint as part of a new list item form, and I really want to find the td in my document whose ‘FieldInternalName’ in the comment matches some text string. How can I use jQuery (or any javascript would really be okay) to best find these td elements?

Answer 1

You could grab the innerHTML of the element and run a regular expression over it.

Example:

// HTML: <div id='myElement'>Lorem <!-- a comment --> ipsum.</div>  var element = document.getElementById('myElement'); alert(element.innerHTML); // alerts 'Lorem <!-- a comment --> ipsum.' // here you could run a regular expression 

Update: a more comprehensive example (with jQuery):

var tds = $('td'), match; tds.each(function(index, element) {     match = $(element).innerHTML.match(/FieldInternalName='(^['])'/);     if (match) alert(match); });