Selecting elements by name with wildcards

Question

Whats a good way to select elements by their name using wildcards?

The website has element names in the form of <a_1786439></a_1786439> which are likely auto-generated. This is doable by xpath, but is it doable using css selectors or jquery selectors which are faster?

This is clearly terrible-coding, but the website is not mine, and I'm writing a userscript for it.

@BhushanKawadkar I use css & jquery selectors often, and if I know of a way I wouldn't ask this question. — simonzack, Sep 16 '14 at 11:47
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3338680/css-selector-by-class-prefix/8588532#8588532 — loveNoHate, Sep 16 '14 at 11:49
@DOCASAREL I need wildcards in the node name, __not__ node attributes. — simonzack, Sep 16 '14 at 11:58
Can please somebody! You want "Selecting elements by name with wildcards". By chance this is called an `attribute selector`. Do you want to solve it or philosoph about wording? — loveNoHate, Sep 16 '14 at 12:01
@DOCASAREL https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/Node.nodeName — simonzack, Sep 16 '14 at 12:07
Why do you assume a selector will be faster than XPath? In any case, if the elements with auto-generated names represent similar items, there's a chance they have something else in common that you can select by. Perhaps some sample markup can help. — BoltClock, Sep 16 '14 at 13:14

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 16 '14 at 12:27

0

This doesn't exist in CSS3, as the spec's section on type selectors only includes names and wildcards, but no combinations of them.

answered Sep 16 '14 at 12:27

simonzack

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 16 '14 at 14:56

It's possible to create custom elements using the HTML DOM createElement method like this:

document.createElement('Funny_Element');

In the website code you are dealing with, they have created a custom element, or maybe extend the a element, but they didn't choose a significant name! a_1786439??? which is, I think, really bad.

Using CSS selectors or jQuery selectors depends essentially on what you want to do. Suppose you have to access children elements of a specific node, then jquery selectors would be more appropriate.

Hope it's useful!

Selecting elements by name with wildcards

2 Answers2

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