Q:

jquery regex .* not working in jquery

Attemping to use jQuery to find a button on a page "id=btn.ar" using . returns no matches even though the button is clearly on the page. Is there something about .* in jquery being different from other Regex's? The buttons exact id is btnClear so its obvious that btn.*ar should match

    $("id=btn.*ar")

A:

If I'm understanding you correctly, this should work:
$('button').filter(function() {
    return this.id.match(/^btn.*ar$/);
}).do_something();

