As part of a Java webapp I’m working on I need to add a

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Asked: June 13, 20262026-06-13T20:27:22+00:00 2026-06-13T20:27:22+00:00

As part of a Java webapp I’m working on I need to add a

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As part of a Java webapp I’m working on I need to add a prefix to some URIs are loaded from a database, e.g.

"controller.jsp?page=list"

becomes…

<a href="${legacyBaseUrl}/controller.jsp?page=list">...</a>

Easy. A problem arises though where some of the URIs in the database contain Javascript, e.g.

"javascript:window.open('controller.jsp?page=popup')"

What I’d like to be able to do is…

<a href="javascript:window.open('${legacyBaseUrl}/controller.jsp?page=popup')">...</a>

or better yet…

<a href="${legacyBaseUrl}/controller.jsp?page=popup" target="_blank">...</a>

I know I can just chop it apart with regular expressions, but I’m wary of treating this as a simple string manipulation problem, as the data has never been sanitized and there could be any Javascript in the database.

Is there a (relatively) simple way to parse Javascript properly in Java, and recognize/extract calls to window.open or other JS function?

I’ve looked briefly at stuff like Rhino or javax.script, but am a bit lost. Is this the right thing for my needs? Would a regex actually be enough? Any suggestions?