Find an element in DOM based on an attribute value

Modern browsers support native querySelectorAll so you can do:

document.querySelectorAll('[data-foo="value"]');

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document.querySelectorAll

Details about browser compatibility:

• http://quirksmode.org/dom/core/#t14
• http://caniuse.com/queryselector

You can use jQuery to support obsolete browsers (IE9 and older):

$('[data-foo="value"]');

We can use attribute selector in DOM by using document.querySelector() and document.querySelectorAll() methods.

for yours:

document.querySelector("[myAttribute='aValue']");

and by using querySelectorAll():

document.querySelectorAll("[myAttribute='aValue']");

In querySelector() and querySelectorAll() methods we can select objects as we select in "CSS".

More about "CSS" attribute selectors in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_selectors

Update: In the past few years the landscape has changed drastically. You can now reliably use querySelector and querySelectorAll, see Wojtek's answer for how to do this.

There's no need for a jQuery dependency now. If you're using jQuery, great...if you're not, you need not rely it on just for selecting elements by attributes anymore.

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There's not a very short way to do this in vanilla javascript, but there are some solutions available.

You do something like this, looping through elements and checking the attribute

If a library like jQuery is an option, you can do it a bit easier, like this:

$("[myAttribute=value]")

If the value isn't a valid CSS identifier (it has spaces or punctuation in it, etc.), you need quotes around the value (they can be single or double):

$("[myAttribute='my value']")

You can also do start-with, ends-with, contains, etc...there are several options for the attribute selector.