While working on a site I came to a situation where I needed to select div classes with a dynamic id number. For instance every new div class would carry it's "id" from my database in its class name like so:

```
<div class="reply_to_08"></div> 

```

So I could do this

```
.reply_to_08 {}

```

But I didn't want to write a new css selector for every div. I wanted to select all of them that had the ".reply\_to\_" in it while ignoring the "08" that being the dynamic number.

So I found a solution on a blog post on a website which was:

```
div[class^=reply_to_]

```

Well it worked, but there was no explanation as to why that would work or how it would work. And I can't seem to understand it.

Can someone explain as to why that works? And is this method recommended or is there another way of achieving what I want?