Using dojo.query with IDs containing colon symbol

While working on my XSnippet to move between pages in a pager control using arrow keys I required to get elements based on pager ID. So I went with dojo.query. But selectors in dojo.query cannot contain characters like colon which XPage extensively uses for generating IDs.

So the code dojo.query("view:_id1:viewPanel1:pager1") will not work. To make it work you need to escape the : with \: or even better with \3A, for backward compatibility with IE.

I wrote a simple helper function escape colon characters from ID.

function escapeColon(controlID) {
    return controlID.replace(/:/g, "\\3A");
}