If I understand you correctly, you want to modify a string that contains periods to have \ in front of every period, to be supported as an id in the jQuery selector. Here is how to do that:

var username = 'some.username.with.dots';



// Replace all periods with \. to 

username = username.replace(/./g, '\\.');



// find element that matches #some\.username\.with\.dots

$('#' + username).doSomethingWithjQuery();

• . means any character in regex, so you need to escape it by putting in front.


• The g regex modifier means greedy, without it the replace expression would only replace the first . with \.

Edit
I tried my code, and it seems like you need to change the replace value to \\. to make it become \.