Because of differences in the way browsers treat whitespace (newlines in particular) when they parse HTML, a pseudo like

:exactly(str)

would not work consistently cross-browser. There is a ticket elsewhere to resolve the whitespace issues in

.text()

but that would require eliminating the

.innerText/.textContent

optimization.

People can use .filter() if they want an exact text match, IMO.

We're not encouraging additions to the selector syntax because non-standard selectors prevent the use of native

querySelectorAll()

implementations supplied by browsers. You can use

.filter()

as ajpiano suggests, or create a simple plugin to implement your own

.equalsText()

method.

I ran into this exact trouble, no selector to match exact text.

It seem to me pretty straightforward to expect an exact matching selector, :contains works but may risk of matching extra elements when the query string is very short, or ALL text elements when the argument is an empty string !!!

Please re-evaluate the addition of an :exactText() selector or a function like .filterText() that return all object having the specified exact text.

I was trying to use .filter for the same purpose but unsuccessfully.

I suggest adding this very nice extension directly into codebase:

$.extend($.expr[':'],{
containsExact: function(a,i,m){
return $.trim(a.innerHTML.toLowerCase()) === m[3].toLowerCase();
},
containsExactCase: function(a,i,m){
return $.trim(a.innerHTML) === m[3];
},
containsRegex: function(a,i,m){
 var regreg =  /^\\/((?:\\\\\\/|[^\\/])+)\\/([mig]{0,3})$/,
  reg = regreg.exec(m[3]);
 return RegExp(reg[1], reg[2]).test($.trim(a.innerHTML));
}
});