How to change the href attribute for a hyperlink using jQuery

html, hyperlink, javascript, jquery

Solution

Using

$("a").attr("href", "http://www.google.com/")

will modify the href of all hyperlinks to point to Google. You probably want a somewhat more refined selector though. For instance, if you have a mix of link source (hyperlink) and link target (a.k.a. "anchor") anchor tags:

<a name="MyLinks"></a>
<a href="http://www.codeproject.com/">The CodeProject</a>

...Then you probably don't want to accidentally add `href` attributes to them. For safety then, we can specify that our selector will only match `<a>` tags with an existing `href` attribute:

$("a[href]") //...

Of course, you'll probably have something more interesting in mind. If you want to match an anchor with a specific existing `href`, you might use something like this:

$("a[href='http://www.google.com/']").attr('href', 'http://www.live.com/')

This will find links where the `href` exactly matches the string `http://www.google.com/`. A more involved task might be matching, then updating only part of the `href`:

$("a[href^='http://stackoverflow.com']")
   .each(function()
   { 
      this.href = this.href.replace(/^http:\/\/beta\.stackoverflow\.com/, 
         "http://stackoverflow.com");
   });

The first part selects only links where the href starts with `http://stackoverflow.com`. Then, a function is defined that uses a simple regular expression to replace this part of the URL with a new one. Note the flexibility this gives you - any sort of modification to the link could be done here.

Problem

Original source

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