Case Insensitive CSS Attribute Selector

By  on  

CSS selectors never cease to amaze me in how powerful they can be in matching complex patterns. Most of that flexibility is in parent/child/sibling relationships, very seldomly in value matching. Consider my surprise when I learned that CSS allows matching attribute values regardless off case!

Adding a {space}i to the attribute selector brackets will make the attribute value search case insensitive:

/* case sensitive, only matches "example" */
[class=example] {
  background: pink;
}

/* case insensitive, matches "example", "eXampLe", etc. */
[class=example i] {
  background: lightblue;
}

The use cases for this i flag are likely very limited, especially if this flag is knew knowledge for you and you're used to a standard lower-case standard. A loose CSS classname standard will have and would continue to lead to problems, so use this case insensitivity flag sparingly!

Recent Features

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools

    Note: This post has been updated. One of my huge web peeves is when an element has click events attached to it but the element doesn't sport the "pointer" cursor. I mean how the hell is the user supposed to know they can/should click on...

  • By
    CSS Vertical Centering

    Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...

Discussion

  1. I just used this in JavaScript to find elements based on title attributes:

    let testEntries = document.querySelectorAll('[title^="${search}" i]');
    

    Exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!