How do you escape parentheses in jQuery selector?

Question

I am trying to check if a td innertext contains parentheses (). The reason is I display negative numbers as (1000) and I need to convert them to -1000 to do math. I've tried a couple different ways but can't seem to get it right. I know there are non-jQuery ways to do this but at this point it's just bugging me. ``` $(tdElement[i]).find("\(").length > 0 ``` This doesn't throw error, but it doesn't find an innertext of (1000): ``` $(tdElement[i]).find("\(") {...} context: {object} jquery: "1.3.1" length: 0 prevObject: {...} selector: "\(" ``` Another method I tried was: ``` $("#fscaTotals td").filter(":contains('\(')") ``` This throws error "Exception thrown and not caught". It seems to work for other characters though. Example: . , ; < > So, how do you escape parentheses in jQuery?

Accepted Answer

I think you'll have to use a filter function like:

```
$('#fscaTotals td *').filter(function(i, el) {
    return !!$(el).text().match(/\(/);
});
```

Edit: I think this is a bug in jQuery's `:contains()`.

How do you escape parentheses in jQuery selector?

Solution

Problem