Question

How would I have a jQuery (preferably) script iterate through every single <a> tag and find any that don’t start with

http://www.example.com/ 

and change the src attribute to

http://www.example.com/outbound/?verifyAge=0&dest='+encodeURIComponent(original_src) 

and also apply rel="external" target="_blank"?

Answer 1

Here‘s a quick proof of concept:

HTML:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>
<a href="test.html">Test</a>

JavaScript:

$('a').not('[href^="http"]').each(function () {
    var element = $(this);
    element.attr('href', element.attr('href') + '?foo=baz');
    element.attr('target', '_blank');
});

Essentially what the JavaScript is doing is finding any a element which doesn’t begin with http (you’ll want to expand that conditional logic for your own needs, as well as handle any issues with having to escape the slashes in the URL or anything like that), grabs a reference to it as a jQuery object (I don’t remember if this is already a jQuery object, if it is you can omit that part), modifies its href attribute and adds a target attribute.