Question

In trying to select elements that have any attributes, the following throws a jQuery syntax error.

$("div[*]")

Is there a selector to check if a tag has any attributes?

Tested with jQuery 1.3

Answer 1

I went with Ariel Popovsky’s suggestion to use filter, though if I needed this in many places, I would use petersendidit’s suggestion of creating a customer selector.

The (important) difference is that the .specified property needs to be checked. IE always returns more than 80 attributes.

Note: even this is not 100%. There are some attributes, like INPUT .value, that are special cases, but since I’m using a DIV, I can ignore them.

$("div").filter(function()
{ 
    for (var i = 0; i < this.attributes.length; i++)
    {
        var attr = this.attributes[i];
        if (attr.specified) 
        {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
})