Question

Can someone help me with a regular expression that would help me do this.

I have a url: http://www.site.com/foo/bar

when a user clicks on a link it will append it to the url making it look like this

http://www.site.com/foo/bar/link1

now for the tricky part, when a second link is clicked it keeps appending to the url like this

http://www.site.com/foo/bar/link1/link2

i would like for link2 to replace link1 making it http://www.site.com/foo/bar/link2

I want to note that the only reason links are appending like this are because I am using this expression to remove the '#' from the link and replacing it with '/'

location.assign(location.href.replace(/\/?#/g, "/"))

without the # the browser will not know to replace the hash marks but its causing me issues with my current setup.

Otherwise the link will look like http://www.site.com/foo/bar#link1 witch doesn’t exist with my setup

I’m using htaccess to replace page.php?type=foo&user=bar&page=link1 http://www.site.com/foo/bar/link1

so ya, my question is how to remove /link1 with /link2 BUT append link2 IF /link1 isn’t present

I want to keep the code as dynamic as possible since the link names could change.

EDIT:
My code

var newHash    = "",
        shref      = "",
        content    = '#content',
        $c         = $("#content"),
        $cw        = $("#content-wrapper");

    $(".menu-link, #my-account-link").live('click', function(){
        shref = $(this).attr("href").split("/");
        //window.location.hash = shref[5];
        //location.assign(location.href.replace(/\/?#/g, "/"))
        window.location.hash = $(this).attr("href");
        //console.log(window.location.hash);
        return false;
    });

    $(window).bind('hashchange', function(){
        /*if (location.href.indexOf("#") > -1) {
            location.assign(location.href.replace(/\/?#/g, "/"));
        }*/
        //TODO:: Find # replace with / then find first (or maybe 3rd/) and replace everything until the next / with ""
        newHash = window.location.hash.substring(1);
        console.log(newHash);
        if(newHash)
        {
            $cw.find(content).fadeOut(200, function() {
                $cw.load(newHash + " #content-wrapper", function() {
                    $c.fadeIn();
                });
            });
        }
    });
    $(window).trigger('hashchange');

Answer 1

var newElement   = document.location.hash.replace('#', ''); // after hash
var pathElements = document.location.pathname.split('/');
var lastElement  = pathElements[pathElements.length - 1];
var endElements  = ['link1', 'link2', 'link3'];

// the final element not in list
if(endElements.indexOf(lastElement) === -1) {
  pathElements.push(newElement);
}
// replace last element
else {
  pathElements.pop();
  pathElements.push(newElement);
}

document.location.pathname = pathElements.join('/');