Question

label {
  display: block;
  width: 156px;
  cursor: pointer;
  padding-right: 6px;
  padding-bottom: 1px;
}

<label for="email">{t _your_email}:</label>

I wish to select the label based on the 'for' attribute to make layout changes.

Answer 1

The selector would be label[for=email], so in CSS:

label[for=email]
{
    /* ...definitions here... */
}

…or in JavaScript using the DOM:

var element = document.querySelector("label[for=email]");

…or in JavaScript using jQuery:

var element = $("label[for=email]");

It’s an attribute selector. Note that some browsers (versions of IE < 8, for instance) may not support attribute selectors, but more recent ones do. To support older browsers like IE6 and IE7, you’d have to use a class (well, or some other structural way), sadly.

(I’m assuming that the template {t _your_email} will fill in a field with id="email". If not, use a class instead.)

Note that if the value of the attribute you’re selecting doesn’t fit the rules for a CSS identifier (for instance, if it has spaces or brackets in it, or starts with a digit, etc.), you need quotes around the value:

label[for="field[]"]
{
    /* ...definitions here... */
}

They can be single or double quotes.