Question

Normally i would only use alphanumeric with – and _ in any html class or id attribute, but i wondered whether it was possible it include a # in the middle of an attribute, e.g:

<div id = "my_css_id_#f4ed11">

I wont’t be a targeting this through CSS, this is purely for javasrcipt.

NOTE The reason I am asking it not because I want to do this, but because of some related PHP code done by someone it would make this part of the project easier.

Thanks

Answer 1

Sure you can. It’s valid as per HTML5.

You’ll simply need to escape the character in a selector (for use in CSS or JavaScript). For the # character, it’s quite simple; you can just use \#.

Here’s a tool that will tell you how to escape any character in a CSS/JS selector: http://mothereff.in/css-escapes#0foo%23bar From that page:

<script>
  // document.getElementById or similar
  document.getElementById('foo#bar');
  // document.querySelector or similar
  $('#foo\\#bar');
</script>

P.S. On the subject of weird characters in ID or class values: http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/html5-id-class