Attribute selectors now require quotations

[dom@…]

It appears that some attribute selectors now require quoting around their values. Failure to do so will throw the following error:

"Syntax error, unrecognized expression: {selector}".

Strangely, this fails with the following piece of code:

$("a[href^=/shortlist/]");

requiring a change to

$("a[href^='/shortlist/']");

but not when using:

$("a[href=#]");

I know this isn't a bug, and that now I check it in fact mentions in the documentation that quotes are mandatory, but it should probably be added as a warning into the release notes, or wherever is appropriate, as it is a change from 1.4.4 that will cause upgrade issues for some.

[jitter]

Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the jQuery project by writing a bug report.

After checking your report I came to the conclusion that this isn't a bug. Actually the behavior in jQuery 1.4.4 was wrong and has been fixed in 1.5

a[href^=/shortlist/] isn't a valid CSS selector which you can easily verify with this  test case

Beside the documentation explicitly stating that "quotes are mandatory" also the  selectors documentation warns you with

If you wish to use any of the meta-characters ( such as !"#$%&'()*+,./:;?@[\]^{`{|}~ ) [...] you must escape the character [...]}

This list includes the / character.

[jitter]

#8223 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[jitter]

#8248 is a duplicate of this ticket.