Question

Just upgraded from jQuery 1.3.2 to 1.8.2 and found that several functions that worked in 1.3.2 no longer work. Most of these I’ve fixed, but stuck on this one:

I need to search based on the first few characters within a table cell (a “starts-with” search), but this code no longer works in recent versions of jQuery:

var matchingElements = $("#tblSelect1>tbody>tr>td:first-child[innerText^='" + text + "']");

I suspect it has something to do with the fact that several things that used to work like attributes are now properties instead – innerText is a property (I think) and so maybe it is not compatible with the attribute starts-with selector notation: [attr^='value']

I do not want to use :contains because I only want the elements whose innerText starts with the search text

Thoughts? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use filter method. innerText is a non-standard property and doesn’t works on Firefox, for supporting all the main browsers you should check both the properties, or use jQuery text method which is cross-browser.

var $matchingElements = $("#tblSelect1 > tbody > tr > td").filter(function(){
      var c = this.textContent || this.innerText;
      return c.indexOf(text) === 0
});