Originally reported by fejesjoco at: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/14692

I read this article:  http://learn.jquery.com/using-jquery-core/faq/how-do-i-select-an-element-by-an-id-that-has-characters-used-in-css-notation/ .

It says plain and simple that a colon and a period must be escaped. And then the example code also escapes square brackets, so there's a problem already. In the future, you may add a new special character for a cool new selector feature, and that will be a breaking change.

I can see already how many bugs have been filed about special characters in selectors and then closed as being documented. I understand it completely. This is not a bug report, this is a feature request.

Please provide a function for escaping special characters in selectors. Benefits:

• it's a very easy utility function to implement and useful in many cases
• all those people who never cared about such issues, will realize they should use this escaping mechanism
• all those people who used to run into problems with special characters before, used to file all those unnecessary bugs, now they will have an out-of-the-box solution instead
• if a spec changes or jQuery API changes, it won't be a breaking change because the updated escape function would handle the new cases too
• the quoted documentation suggests to copy-paste some code into my own JS, but jQuery is about helping eliminate those kinds of code pieces, it would be great to have it embedded

I also realized there are much more characters which could need escaping if we're not just talking about the restricted ID's:  http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/ . This proposed escape function could handle that as well. I hope it's not a problem if it unnecessarily escapes characters in a selector in cases when it's not needed.

Issue reported for jQuery 1.10.2