javascript - Exclusive CSS selector

Question

I am working on a page where the selected item among a list is characterized by NOT having a given class. Something like the following:

<ul>
  <li class="a">not selected</li>
  <li class="a b">selected</li>
  <li class="a">not selected</li>
</ul>

I would like to defined a CSS selector to grab the li node in the page having ONLY the a class. Unsurprisingly the following statement is not enough:

document.querySelectorAll('li.a')

Because it returns ALL the li nodes having the a class.

Any experience on such scenario?

Answer 1

In such case you may consider attribute selector like this:

console.log(document.querySelectorAll('li[class="a"]').length)

li[class="a"] {
  color:red;
}

<ul>
  <li class="a">Select me</li>
  <li class="a b c d more classes">Don't select me</li>
  <li class="a b">Don't select me</li>
  <li class="a">Select me</li>
</ul>