jQuery selector | = in $（“[name | ='value']”）

Question

I found this snippet in some javascript code:

var name = "someString";
var s = "[name|='"+name+"']";
var nArr = $JQ(s);

Can someone explain what |= does?

I can see in my debug tool that I receive an array of jQuery elements, which all have someString in their name. But I wasn't able to find an explanation in the jQuery documentation. What am I missing?

Answer 1

This is attribute contains prefix selector

Selects elements that have the specified attribute with a value either equal to a given string or starting with that string followed by a hyphen (-).

 $("a[hreflang|='en']").css("color", "green"); 

 a { display: block; } 

 <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.0/jquery.min.js"></script> <a href="example.html" hreflang="en">Some text</a> <a href="example.html" hreflang="en-UK">Some other text</a> <a href="example.html" hreflang="english">will not be selected</a> 

---

This selector was introduced into the CSS specification to handle language attributes.

W3

Represents an element with the att attribute, its value either being exactly "val" or beginning with "val" immediately followed by "-" (U+002D). This is primarily intended to allow language subcode matches (eg, the hreflang attribute on the a element in HTML) as described in BCP 47 ([BCP47]) or its successor.