Handling apostrophe in a Attribute Equals Selector

[Suvojit Chakraborty]

Hi All,

I am facing trouble in handling a situation where value of attribute equals selector may contains an apostrophe. Below is a detailed explanation of my problem :

$('option[value='+l_val[l_i].split("#")[0]+']',$('#fldAllQuestions')).remove();

Here l_val[l_i].split("#")[0] may contain a string like "How many Brother's do you have?". There is a listbox containing question list. Above code removes questions from that list. If the Question to be removed has no apostrophe then it works fine. However with an apostrophe it give error,
"Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: option[value=How many Brother's do you have?]"

I am unable to escape the apostrophe.

Please suggest a fix for same.

Thanks
Suvo

[Rob Crowther]

I'm not really clear here - why are you unable to escape the apostrophe? Or are you asking how to escape the apostrophe? (BTW, with a backslash: '\'')

Also note: in the sentence in your example code, there shouldn't be an apostrophe. It should be a plural "Brothers", it is not the possessive "Your Brother's option".

OK, I've tried your example now, the fundamental problem is that this is not a valid CSS selector:
option[value=How many of your Brother's books do you have?]
It produces an error like this in the browser console:
Expected ']' to terminate attribute selector but found 'many'. Found unclosed string ''s do you have?] {'. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector.
However, this is a valid selector:
option[value="How many of your Brother's books do you have?"]
The slightly counter-intuitive thing when converting this to a JavaScript statement is that what quotes you have to escape depends on what quotes you're using to wrap the whole string. Because your string is wrapped in double quotes, it's those that need to be escaped:
$("option[value=\"How many of your Brother's books do you have?\"]")
Note that I changed the sentence to one in which the apostrophe is grammatically appropriate.