Why is “#.id” a bad selector in CSS/jQuery yet it works in an HTML anchor?

Question

I\'m using JSDoc. It generates ids with a period as in

If another part of the page has

Answer 1

You have to escape . with \\ before querying for elements. Replace

document.querySelector('#.someMethodName');

To

document.querySelector('#\\.someMethodName');

Also note that technically, for HTML 4 required ID value format is specified below:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

So .[A-Za-z] is invalid one..