Question

I am very new to jQuery and am making a history API-ish script in jQuery so only the needed info in a new page loads on a click. The problem is I don’t know how to place the var in the handler, atleast I think its called the handler. It will definitely be a simple thing.

 $("a#click").click(function() {
 var addressValue = $(this).attr("href");

  $("#main").load("addressValue #load");

 return false;
});

Answer 1

If you use:

 $("a#click").click(function() {
 var addressValue = this.href;

  $("#main").load(addressValue + " #load");

 return false;
});

It should work; the problem was that you were placing the variable into the string, so it was being evaluated as the variable-name, not the variable concatenated with the ' #load' string.

Also, for the href it’s slightly faster to avoid invoking jQuery, and just use the native DOM approach (it’s a micro optimisation, but it’s just slightly cheaper).

It’s worth noting that this.href does (sometimes-problematically) retrieve the absolute path implied by whatever value is, strictly speaking, inside of the href attribute, including the domain. Whereas the jQuery approach simply retrieves whatever is in the attribute, so:

<a href="/help/contact.html">contact page</a>:
this.href            : "http://subdomain.example.com/help/contact.html"
$(this).attr('href') : "/help/contact.html"