Target ID to hide active link with pseudo ID?

Question

I have a unique situation where a dynamically driven link contains a type of ID I'm not able to target and hide with jquery. I'm calling it a pseudo ID, since it reminds me of pseudo classes, but I don't even think this type of ID exists.

Do you have a solution how I can target this link and hide it with this ID? I'm not able to physically change the ID, so I'm stuck hoping there was a way to get at it with jquery.

Here is the HTML with the ID in question:

<a href="http://www.helloworld.com" id="msgForum:print">test</a>

I tried removing it with an easy hide function, but I'm not able to target it, because of the :print that is present.

$('#msgForum:print').hide();

Here is my fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/YAMVA/1/

Answer 1

You just need to escape the special character : in the selector with double backslashes.

$('#msgForum\\:print').hide();

http://jsfiddle.net/jqHES/

from the jQuery Selectors documentation

To use any of the meta-characters ( such as  !"#$%&'()*+,./:;?@[\]^`{|}~ ) as a literal part of
a name, it must be escaped with with two backslashes: \\. For example, an element with id="foo.bar", 
can use the selector $("#foo\\.bar"). 

Answer 2

use \\ to escape any special characters.

$('#msgForum\\:print').hide();

http://jsfiddle.net/YAMVA/3/

Specials characters : !"#$%&'()*+,./:;?@[\]^{|}~

Answer 3

You could take advantage of id attribute selector:

DEMO

$('[id="msgForum:print"]').hide();