How to make an anchor tag refer to nothing?

Question

I use jQuery, I need to make some anchor tags perform no action.

I usually write it like this:

link

H

Answer 1

You can have an HTML anchor (a tag) without an href attribute. Leave off the href attribute & it won't link to anything:

<a>link</a>

Answer 2

I know this is tagged as a jQuery question, but you can answer this with AngularJS, also.

in your element, add the ng-click directive and use the $event variable which is the click event... prevent its default behavior:

<a href="#" ng-click="$event.preventDefault()">

You can even pass the $event variable into a function:

<a href="#" ng-click="doSomething($event)">

in that function, you do whatever you want with the click event.

Answer 3

I know this is an old question, but I thought I'd add my two cents anyway:

It depends on what the link is going to do, but usually, I would be pointing the link at a url that could possibly be displaying/doing the same thing, for example, if you're making a little about box pop up:

<a id="about" href="/about">About</a>

Then with jQuery

$('#about').click(function(e) {
    $('#aboutbox').show();
    e.preventDefault();
});

This way, very old browsers (or browsers with JavaScript disabled) can still navigate to a separate about page, but more importantly, Google will also pick this up and crawl the contents of the about page.

Answer 4

Here are the three ways for <a> tag's href tag property refer to nothing:

<a href="JavaScript:void(0)"> link </a>

<a href="javascript:;">link</a >

<a href="#" onclick="return false;"> Link </a>

Answer 5

Make sure all your links that you want to stop have href="#!" (or anything you want, really), and then use this:

jq('body').on('click.stop_link', 'a[href="#!"]',
function(event) {
     event.preventDefault();
});

Answer 6

To make it do nothing at all, use this:

<a href="javascript:void(0)"> ... </a>