Question

I’ve tried to search for a user-agent string in a table using jQuery. If I search like this it is not found:

jQuery("table.make-html-table
td:contains('Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)')")
.css("background","yellow");

If I search like this – slashes before \( – then it give me an error:

jQuery("table.make-html-table
td:contains('Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)')")
.css("background","yellow");

Error:

"Syntax error, unrecognized expression: (comp...

How can I properly escape that string so that I can search for cells that contain it with jQuery?

Answer 1

The relevant part in sizzle is

PSEUDO: /:((?:[\w\u00c0-\uFFFF\-]|\\.)+)(?:\((['"]?)((?:\([^\)]+\)|[^\(\)]*)+)\2\))?/

which makes me think there is no way. Looks like it only accepts arguments that contain no parenthesis at all, or only one level thereof like :contains("(foo)"). An obvious improvement would be accept anything if an argument is quoted, hope this will be fixed soon.

For the time being, a workaround would be to write a selector that would accept escaped arguments, for example:

$.extend($.expr[':'], {
    containsEscaped: function (el, index, m) {  
        var s = unescape(m[3]);
        return $(el).text().indexOf(s) >= 0;
    }  
});      

usage:

var p = $("p:containsEscaped('foo%28bar')");

In action: http://jsfiddle.net/9wWP5/