Parsing XFN data with Jquery

Question

I'm trying to filter the XFN relationships meta data found in web pages. It is something like this:

<a href="site" rel="friend colleague" >Name</a>

in REL you can have various values, like "friend", "collegue" but even "me" and "met" because you can have multiple values, I did this:

xfn_me = $("a[rel*=me]").length; 

But this doesn't work, because both "me" and "met" are matched! Is there a way to filter the values exactly, even when there are multiple values?

Thank you.

Please note that I have no control on the page, in fact I'm working on a Chrome extension, and this code should runs on any web page.

Answer 1

You could use the [attribute~=value] selector. It selects based on space-separated values exactly like how xfn and CSS classes work, i.e. [class~=className] is exactly the same as .className.

xfn_me = $("a[rel~=me]").length;

I couldn't find it in the jQuery documentation, but it works in 1.3 at least.

Answer 2

Since you are using jQuery, you could do it this way:

$('a[rel*=me]').filter(function(){ 
   return $.inArray('me', $(this).attr('rel').split(' ')) > -1;
}).length;

That basically finds all the a elements that might be a match, then filters them by splitting the rel tag into an array and checking the actual match is found.

Edit: I updated my code from !$.inArray to $.inArray > -1 as found by @UVL.

Answer 3

A solution (until jquery 1.2 at least) is this:

xfn_me = $('a[rel*=me]').filter(function(){ 
 return $.inArray('me', $(this).attr('rel').split(' ')) > -1;
}).length;

Puts in xfn_me the number of A tags with rel matching "me", even when multiple rel values are used.