How to get all elements which name starts with some string?

A quick and easy way is to use jQuery and do this:

var $eles = $(":input[name^='q1_']").css("color","yellow");

That will grab all elements whose name attribute starts with ‘q1_’. To convert the resulting collection of jQuery objects to a DOM collection, do this:

var DOMeles = $eles.get();

see http://api.jquery.com/attribute-starts-with-selector/

In pure DOM, you could use getElementsByTagName to grab all input elements, and loop through the resulting array. Elements with name starting with ‘q1_’ get pushed to another array:

var eles = [];
var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
for(var i = 0; i < inputs.length; i++) {
    if(inputs[i].name.indexOf('q1_') == 0) {
        eles.push(inputs[i]);
    }
}