Jquery Selector That Simulates :starts-with Or :ends-with For Searching Text?

If you look at the selectors list on the jQuery website, there are selectors for starts-with and ends-with on attributes. There's also a :contains selector for searching text: aler

Solution 1:

Not by default as far as I know, but you can add your own pseudo-selectors through $.expr[":"]: http://jsfiddle.net/h6KYk/.

$.extend($.expr[":"], {
    "starts-with": function(elem, i, data, set) {
        var text = $.trim($(elem).text()),
            term = data[3];

        // first index is 0return text.indexOf(term) === 0;
    },

    "ends-with": function(elem, i, data, set) {
        var text = $.trim($(elem).text()),
            term = data[3];

        // last index is last possiblereturn text.lastIndexOf(term) === text.length - term.length;
    }
});

Solution 2:

When you don't want to extend jQuery, you can use the filter() function to create the contains functionality:

$("div").find("span").filter(function () {
    return $(this).text().indexOf(text) >= 0;
});

Or create a startsWith function with a regular expression:

var expression = newRegExp('^' + text);
$("div").find("span").filter(function () {
    return expression.test($.trim($(this).text()));
});

The endsWith function is quite similar:

var expression = newRegExp(text + '$');
$("div").find("span").filter(function () {
    return expression.test($.trim($(this).text()));
});

Note the use of $.trim() because HTML can contain a lot of whitespace.