How to change the href for a hyperlink using jQuery

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

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Answer 2

With jQuery 1.6 and above you should use:

$("a").prop("href", "http://www.jakcms.com")

The difference between prop and attr is that attr grabs the HTML attribute whereas prop grabs the DOM property.

Answer 3

Depending on whether you want to change all the identical links to something else or you want control over just the ones in a given section of the page or each one individually, you could do one of these.

Change all links to Google so they point to Google Maps:

<a href="http://www.google.com">

$("a[href='http://www.google.com/']").attr('href', 
'http://maps.google.com/');

To change links in a given section, add the container div's class to the selector. This example will change the Google link in the content, but not in the footer:

<div class="content">
    <p>...link to <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>
    in the content...</p>
</div>

<div class="footer">
    Links: <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>
</div>

$(".content a[href='http://www.google.com/']").attr('href', 
'http://maps.google.com/');

To change individual links regardless of where they fall in the document, add an id to the link and then add that id to the selector. This example will change the second Google link in the content, but not the first one or the one in the footer:

<div class="content">
    <p>...link to <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>
    in the content...</p>
    <p>...second link to <a href="http://www.google.com/" 
        id="changeme">Google</a>
    in the content...</p>
</div>

<div class="footer">
    Links: <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>
</div>

$("a#changeme").attr('href', 
'http://maps.google.com/');