Supported selectors

The Spry Element Selector supports the following selectors:

Selector pattern	Description
E	an element of type E (for example div, p, etc.)
E.className	an E element with a specified classname
E#id	an E element with ID equal to "id".
E F	an F element descendant of an E element
*	any element
E:first-child	an E element, first child of its parent
E[foo]	an E element with a "foo" attribute. Note: When using E[class], this will fail on Internet Explorer, since it adds a class attribute to every element, even those with out a class in the markup. This is a browser issue and not a Spry issue.
E > F	an F element child of an E element
E[foo~="bar"]	an E element whose "foo" attribute value is a list of space-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to "bar"
E[hreflang\|="en"]	an E element whose "hreflang" attribute has a hyphen-separated list of values beginning (from the left) with "en"
E[foo="bar"]	an E element whose "foo" attribute value is exactly equal to "bar"
E + F	an F element immediately preceded by an E element
E[foo$="bar"]	an E element whose "foo" attribute value ends exactly with the string "bar"
E:last-child	an E element, last child of its parent
E:nth-last-of-type(n)	an E element, the n-th sibling of its type, counting from the last one
E:nth-of-type(n)	an E element, the n-th sibling of its type
E[foo^="bar"]	an E element whose "foo" attribute value begins exactly with the string "bar"
E:nth-last-child(n)	an E element, the n-th child of its parent, counting from the last one
E:empty	an E element that has no children (including text nodes)
E:nth-child(n)	an E element, the n-th child of its parent
E:only-of-type	an E element, only sibling of its type
E:not(s)	an E element that does not match simple selector s
E:only-child	an E element, only child of its parent
E:last-of-type	an E element, last sibling of its type
E:first-of-type	an E element, first sibling of its type
E[foo*="bar"]	an E element whose "foo" attribute value contains the substring "bar"
E ~ F	an F element preceded by an E element
E:checked	an E element that is checked (radio buttons or checkboxes)
E:disabled	an E element that is set at disabled (form elements)
E:enabled	an E element that is enabled (form elements that are not explicitly disabled.)

These selectors can be combined to achieve a more flexible or specific selection. For example, the following selector combines several selectors to ultimately select the div that’s assigned a “product” class, and has a title attribute that is equal to the string "Dreamweaver", but only if it is the first child element of its parent:

Spry.$$("div.product[title=Dreamweaver]:first-child");

Likewise, you can combine multiple selectors into a sequence with a comma, just as you can in a CSS rule. The following example selects all the divs the previous example selects, and also selects any span tags with a class of "name":

Spry.$$("div.product[title=Dreamweaver]:first-child, span.name");

The Spry Element selector does not support the following selectors:

Selector pattern	Description
E:link E:visited	an E element being the source anchor of a hyperlink of which the target is not yet visited (:link) or already visited (:visited)
E:active E:hover E:focus	an E element during certain user actions
E::first-line	the first formatted line of an E element
E::first-letter	the first formatted letter of an E element
E::before	generated content before an E element
E::after	generated content after an E element
E:target	an E element being the target of the referring URI
E:lang(fr)	an element of type E in language "fr". The document language specifies how language is determined.
E::selection	the portion of an E element that is currently selected/highlighted by the user

According to the W3C spec, spaces are generally not allowed within the selector except when they are part of the actual selector. For example:

Spry.$$("DIV P").addClassName("redText"); Correct.
Spry.$$("p[class~=dev]").setAttribute("align", "left"); Correct.
Spry.$$("p[class ~= dev]").setAttribute("align", "left"); Not
correct.