Question

It seems that jQuery :contains selector does not work on IE8.

Please see following example on IE – LIVE DEMO

JS:

$('table tr td:contains(" + ")').each( function(){
        $(this).addClass('url');
});

Answer 1

You need to convert the spaces in your TDs to HTML entities ( )

for $('table tr td:contains(" + ")') to work. (Same JS/CSS)

HTML:

<table>
    <tr>
         <td>&nbsp;+&nbsp;</td>
         <td> 1 </td>
         <td> 3 </td>
         <td> 6 </td>
         <td> 7 </td>
    </tr>
</table>

However it will fail on modern browsers, so the solution is to replace the entities for those browsers. Just prepend this snippet before yours, it will do the job.

if( !($.browser.msie && $.browser.version < 10) ){
    $('table tr td').each(function(){
        $(this).html( $(this).html().replace(/&nbsp;/gi, ' ') );
    });
}