How to change the href for a hyperlink using jQuery

Question

How can you change the href for a hyperlink using jQuery?

Answer 1

This snippet invokes when a link of class 'menu_link' is clicked, and shows the text and url of the link. The return false prevents the link from being followed.

<a rel='1' class="menu_link" href="option1.html">Option 1</a>
<a rel='2' class="menu_link" href="option2.html">Option 2</a>

$('.menu_link').live('click', function() {
   var thelink = $(this);
   alert ( thelink.html() );
   alert ( thelink.attr('href') );
   alert ( thelink.attr('rel') );

   return false;
});

Answer 2

Use the attr method on your lookup. You can switch out any attribute with a new value.

$("a.mylink").attr("href", "http://cupcream.com");

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

href in an attribute, so you can change it using pure JavaScript, but if you already have jQuery injected in your page, don't worry, I will show it both ways:

Imagine you have this href below:

<a id="ali" alt="Ali" href="http://dezfoolian.com.au">Alireza Dezfoolian</a>

And you like to change it the link...

Using pure JavaScript without any library you can do:

document.getElementById("ali").setAttribute("href", "https://stackoverflow.com");

But also in jQuery you can do:

$("#ali").attr("href", "https://stackoverflow.com");

or

$("#ali").prop("href", "https://stackoverflow.com");

In this case, if you already have jQuery injected, probably jQuery one look shorter and more cross-browser...but other than that I go with the JS one...

Answer 5

Change the HREF of the Wordpress Avada Theme Logo Image

If you install the ShortCode Exec PHP plugin the you can create this Shortcode which I called myjavascript

?><script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
jQuery("div.fusion-logo a").attr("href","tel:303-985-9850");
});
</script>

You can now go to Appearance/Widgets and pick one of the footer widget areas and use a text widget to add the following shortcode

[myjavascript]

The selector may change depending upon what image your using and if it's retina ready but you can always figure it out by using developers tools.

Answer 6

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