Question

Having such an html:

<a class="someclass" href="some/url/absolute/or/relative">Blah</a>

… along with such javascript:

$("a.someclass").onclick(function() {
    var link = $(this).attr("href");
    if (link == window.location) // <<<<<<<<<<<<
        doSomethingSpecial();
    else
        doOtherThing();
    return false;
});

this code obviously doesn’t work.

How to reliably detect that some anchor is leading to the current browser location?

Here are some notes:

• Anchor’s href could be either absolute or relative.
• the fragments of the URLs should be ignored.

Answer 1

The problem is that $('a').attr('href') always returns the relative path. You need to use the native obj.href attribute to get the absolute path, strip hashes and then compare:

var clean = function(str) {
    return str.replace(/(\#.*)/,'').toLowerCase();
}

$("a.someclass").click(function(e) {
    if (clean(this.href) == clean(window.location)) {
        // the link destination is equal to window.location (excluding hashes)
        doSomethingSpecial();
    } else {
        doOtherThing();
    }
    e.preventDefault();
});

EDIT:

If you want to compare pathnames, you can grab it directly from the anchor element:

$("a.someclass").click(function(e) {
    if (this.pathname == window.location.pathnname) {
        doSomethingSpecial();
    } else {
        doOtherThing();
    }
    e.preventDefault();
});