javascript - Regular expression getElementById

Question

I need to use pure Javascript for the first time in a long while, and having gotten used to the comfy mattress of jQuery, all the important stuff is escaping me.

I need to select a bunch of divs on regular expression. So I have stuff like this;

<div id="id_123456_7890123"> .. </div>
<div id="id_123456_1120092"> .. </div>
<div id="id_555222_1200192"> .. </div>
<div id="id_123456_9882311"> .. </div>

And I'd need to create a loop that goes through all the divs with an id that begins with id_123456_. How would I go about doing that?

I used jQuery with the :regex filter plugin before, but looking at it, it doesn't seem like there's much I could salvage in a pure javascript rewrite.

Answer 1

In plain javascript, you could do this generic search which should work in every browser:

var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div"), item;
for (var i = 0, len = divs.length; i < len; i++) {
    item = divs[i];
    if (item.id && item.id.indexOf("id_123456_") == 0) {
        // item.id starts with id_123456_
    }
}

Working example: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/pYSCq/