Target elements with ids that contain special characters using jQuery

Let's say you have some HTML elements with ids like this one:

<div id="form~myform$div~mydiv[1]#value"></div>

And you would like to target this element using jQuery.
This will not work because of the special characters used in the element's id.
If you execute the following jQuery:

$("div").each(function() {
    var divId = this.id;
    var jQueryFound = $('#' + this.id).length;
        
    alert("Div id is '" + divId + "' and jQuery found " + jQueryFound);
});

The result is: Div id='form~myform$div~mydiv[1]#value' and jQuery found 0.
JQuery cannot find the element id because it contains meta-characters that jQuery parses as part of the selector.
To solve this problem i wrote a method which escapes the special characters so jQuery parses them as part of the id.

var jEscape = function(jquery) {
    jquery = jquery.replace(new RegExp("\\$", "g"), "\\$");
    jquery = jquery.replace(new RegExp("\~", "g"), "\\~");
    jquery = jquery.replace(new RegExp("\\[", "g"), "\\[");
    jquery = jquery.replace(new RegExp("\\]", "g"), "\\]");
    jquery = jquery.replace(new RegExp("#", "g"), "\\#");
    return jquery;
};

Now execute the following code to see that it works:

$("div").each(function() {
    var divId = this.id;
    var escapedId = jEscape(this.id);
    var jQueryFound = $('#' + escapedId).length;
    
    alert("Div id is '" + divId + "' which is escaped to '" + escapedId + "' and jQuery found " + jQueryFound);
});

The result is: Div id is 'form~myform$div~mydiv[1]#value' which is escaped to 'form\~myform\$div\~mydiv\[1\]\#value' and jQuery found 1.

If you want to escape all the possible jQuery meta-characters, expand the method to escape these: ;&,.+*':"!^()=>|/

/Ruud