Getting all mailto links with jQuery

Question

I need a pattern that will traverse the document and get me all links that have mailto in their href:

<a href="mailto:an@email.com">text</a>

I could of course easily get all a elements ($("a")) and check each href attribute to see if it points to a mailto but I think that jQuery has some form of pattern matching that will allow me to do just that.

What is the best way to achieve that?

Answer 1

$('a[href^="mailto:"]')

Double quotes are usually redundant, but needed in this special case, because : would otherwise be interpreted as the start of a pseudo-selector. So $('a[href^=mailto]') would also work, but in this particular scenario, the quotes are probably a neater way to go.