Is there a way to get the anchor part of a URL in a controller?
Example: if I type http://www.foo.com/bar#anchor123 can I get the string anchor123 in my controller?<
You can't do that in Rails, because the anchor is not sent to the server. See mikeduncan.com/?s=named+anchors
No sorry, it's not possible to retrieve the #anchor from the server-side (in any language).
This is a client-side flag to tell the browser to move to a specific position in the page.
But you can use some Javascript in the body to check for an anchor and send it back to the server using an Ajax-call...
var anchor_value;
var stripped_url = document.location.toString().split("#");
if (stripped_url.length > 1)
anchor_value = stripped_url[1];