Getting an anchor element's absolute URL with jQuery

Question

Given an anchor element (with something like $(\"a:first\")), how do you get the absolute URL that the anchor points to?

Answer 1

var x = "http://lol.com/" + $("a:first").prop('href');

that should work unless it's an external url :)

Answer 2

to get the URL attached you can do something like...

var url = $("a:first").attr('href'); this will give you the URL but doesnt guarantee absolute or relative.

To find the absolute URL you can further check

if(!url.startsWith("http")) { url = "http://www.mysite.com" + url}

Answer 3

If you're using jQuery 1.6+, you can use .prop():

$("a:first").prop("href")

Prior to 1.6, you can access the href property directly on the DOM element:

$("a:first")[0].href;