Question

I am writing some JavaScript that what I essentially want to do is confirm when a user clicks a link that they do actually want to click it.

My code currently looks like this:

var Anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");

for (var i = 0; i < Anchors.length ; i++)
{
    Anchors[i].addEventListener("click", function () { return confirm('Are you sure?'); }, false);
}

This code displays the confirm box as I would expect to see it, but then navigates to the link regardless of the button pressed in the confirm box.

I believe the problem is related to my usage of the addEventListener (or a limitation of the implementation of it) because if I add manually write the following in a HTML file, the behaviour is exactly what I would expect:

<a href="http://www.google.com" onclick="return confirm('Are you sure?')">Google</a><br />

Answer 1

I changed your onclick function to include a call to event.preventDefault() and it seemed to get it working:

var Anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");

for (var i = 0; i < Anchors.length ; i++) {
    Anchors[i].addEventListener("click", 
        function (event) {
            event.preventDefault();
            if (confirm('Are you sure?')) {
                window.location = this.href;
            }
        }, 
        false);
}

(See http://jsfiddle.net/ianoxley/vUP3G/1/)