How to test if selector is valid in jQuery

Question

I am using AnythingSlider jQuery plugin which dynamically reads the hash in the URL and selects an item on a page via jQuery. The problem is the end user can break the plugin if they get to http://mydomain.com/#!demos/slider.

Is there a way to test if a selector is valid instead of letting jQuery crashing (built in function or regex)? See this jsFiddle example that tries to do $('#!demos/slider') and it crashes: http://jsfiddle.net/PvY2b/

$('#!demos/slider') <= Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: #!demo/slider

Answer 1

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

From: Basic HTML data types

Therefore something like this might work:

if (/^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9\-_:\.]*$/.test(selector)) {
    // $('#' + selector)...
}

Or simply escape it:

selector = selector.replace(/([;&,\.\+\*\~':"\!\^#$%@\[\]\(\)=>\|])/g, '\\$1');