How do I modify the URL without reloading the page?

Question

Is there a way I can modify the URL of the current page without reloading the page? I would like to access the portion before the # hash if possible. I only need to change the portion after the domain, so it's not like I'm violating cross-domain policies.

 window.location.href = "www.mysite.com/page2.php";  // Sadly this reloads

Answer 1

This can now be done in Chrome, Safari, Firefox 4+, and Internet Explorer 10pp4+!

See this question's answer for more information: Updating address bar with new URL without hash or reloading the page

Example:

 function processAjaxData(response, urlPath){
     document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = response.html;
     document.title = response.pageTitle;
     window.history.pushState({"html":response.html,"pageTitle":response.pageTitle},"", urlPath);
 }

You can then use window.onpopstate to detect the back/forward button navigation:

window.onpopstate = function(e){
    if(e.state){
        document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = e.state.html;
        document.title = e.state.pageTitle;
    }
};

Answer 2

You can also use HTML5 replaceState if you want to change the url but don't want to add the entry to the browser history:

if (window.history.replaceState) {
   //prevents browser from storing history with each change:
   window.history.replaceState(statedata, title, url);
}

This would 'break' the back button functionality. This may be required in some instances such as an image gallery (where you want the back button to return back to the gallery index page instead of moving back through each and every image you viewed) whilst giving each image its own unique url.

Answer 3

In modern browsers and HTML5, there is a method called pushState on window history. That will change the URL and push it to the history without loading the page.

You can use it like this, it will take 3 parameters, 1) state object 2) title and a URL):

window.history.pushState({page: "another"}, "another page", "example.html");

This will change the URL, but not reload the page. Also, it doesn't check if the page exist, so if you do some JavaScript code which be reacting to the URL, you can work with them like this.

Also there is history.replaceState() which does exactly the same thing, except it will modify the current history instead of creating a new one!

Also you can create a function to check if history.pushState exist, then carry on with the rest like this:

function goTo(page, title, url) {
  if ("undefined" !== typeof history.pushState) {
    history.pushState({page: page}, title, url);
  } else {
    window.location.assign(url);
  }
}

goTo("another page", "example", 'example.html');

Also you can change the # for <HTML5 browsers, which won't reload the page. That's the way Angular uses to do SPA according to hashtag...

Changing # is quite easy, doing like:

window.location.hash = "example";

And you can detect it like this:

window.onhashchange = function () {
  console.log("#changed", window.location.hash);
}