Prototype $ and $$ with special characters

Is there anyway by which i can use the $ or $$ utility selectors with arguments containing special characters?

<div id="my example">

$('my example')

<div class="item1\item2">

$$('div.item1\item2')

I've tried开发者_如何学编程 using the standard escape sequence \ but am having no luck.

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Arguments to those functions can contain ids of elements. As the spec says:

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 (".").

This implies that special characters within ids are not allowed.