How do I select an element in jQuery by using a variable for the ID?

row = $("body").find('#' + row_id);

More importantly doing the additional body.find has no impact on performance. The proper way to do this is simply:

row = $('#' + row_id);

The shortest way would be:

$("#" + row_id)

Limiting the search to the body doesn't have any benefit.

Also, you should consider renaming your ids to something more meaningful (and HTML compliant as per Paolo's answer), especially if you have another set of data that needs to be named as well.