What is this CSS selector? [class*="span"]

I saw this selector in Twitter Bootstrap:

.show-grid [class*="span"] {
    background-color: #eee;
    text-align: center;
    border-radius: 3px;
    min-height: 30px;
    line-height: 30px;
}

Does anyone know what this technique is called and what it does?

It's an attribute wildcard selector. In the sample you've given, it looks for any child element under .show-grid that has a class that CONTAINS span.

So would select the <strong> element in this example:

<div class="show-grid">
    <strong class="span6">Blah blah</strong>
</div>

You can also do searches for 'begins with...'

div[class^="something"] { }

which would work on something like this:-

<div class="something-else-class"></div>

and 'ends with...'

div[class$="something"] { }

which would work on

<div class="you-are-something"></div>

Good references

• CSS3 Attribute Selectors: Substring Matching
• The 30 CSS Selectors you Must Memorize
• W3C CSS3 Selectors

.show-grid [class*="span"]

It's a CSS selector that selects all elements with the class show-grid that has a child element whose class contains the name span.

The Following:

.show-grid [class*="span"] {

means that all child elements of '.show-grid' with a class that CONTAINS the word 'span' in it will acquire those CSS properties.

<div class="show-grid">
  <div class="span">.span</div>
  <div class="span6">span6</div>
  <div class="attention-span">attention</div>
  <div class="spanish">spanish</div>
  <div class="mariospan">mariospan</div>
  <div class="espanol">espanol</div>
  
  <div>
    <div class="span">.span</div>
  </div>
  
  <p class="span">span</p>
  <span class="span">I do GET HIT</span>
  
  <span>I DO NOT GET HIT since I need a class of 'span'</span>
</div>

<div class="span">I DO NOT GET HIT since I'm outside of .show-grid</span>

All of the elements get hit except for the <span> by itself.

In Regards to Bootstrap:

• span6 : this was Bootstrap 2's scaffolding technique which divided a section into a horizontal grid, based on parts of 12. Thus span6 would have a width of 50%.

• In the current day implementation of Bootstrap (v.3 and v.4), you now use the .col-* classes (e.g. col-sm-6), which also specifies a media breakpoint to handle responsiveness when the window shrinks below a certain size. Check Bootstrap 4.1 and Bootstrap 3.3.7 for more documentation. I would recommend going with a later Bootstrap nowadays

It selects all elements where the class name contains the string "span" somewhere. There's also ^= for the beginning of a string, and $= for the end of a string. Here's a good reference for some CSS selectors.

I'm only familiar with the bootstrap classes spanX where X is an integer, but if there were other selectors that ended in span, it would also fall under these rules.

It just helps to apply blanket CSS rules.