Attribute selectors now require quotations

[[email protected]…]

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 !"#$%&'()*+,./:;[email protected][\]^{`{|}~ ) [...] 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.