Question

I have 2 index pages with approx. 150 links on each. I would rather maintain 1 page and just generate the links dynamically based on a variable value. For example create a list of links. link1, link2, link3… and based on a variable value being ‘true’ replace those links with list of alternate links i.e. altlink1, altlink2, altlink3…

I have figured out how to do this once but rather than writing the same code over and over for each link I was wondering if there was a faster way. Like creating a list “a” and corresponding list “b” or something like that. I have included my current code below and I look forward to your advice.

<script type="text/javascript">          
// link rewriter        
var hostadd = location.host;
var vendor = '999.99.999.99';
var localaccess = 'somesite.com';

    $(document).ready (
    function link_switcher(){ 
    //if not a vendor route to alternate website
    if (hostadd != vendor) { $("a[href= 'https://www.somelink1.com']").attr    ('href', 'https://www.alternatelink1.com')  }
});
</script>

is it possible to create an array and then javascript that would say replace link1 in array a with alternatelink1 in array b?

Answer 1

It’s still not entirely clear what you’re trying to do, but if you want to rewrite all links based on a lookup table that tells you what link to convert to what, here’s how you could do that:

// Table of links. 
// Key is original page source URL
// Data is link to change it to
var linkData = {
    "http://www.google.com": "http://www.bing.com/",
    "http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox": "http://www.hotmail.com"    
};

// find every link in the page and change it if it's value is found in the linkData table
$("a").each(function() {
    var link = this.getAttribute("href");  // use getAttribute to get what was actually in the page, perhaps not fully qualified
    if (linkData[link]) {
        this.href = linkData[link];
    }
});

If the link is not found in the table, it will not be modified. If there was some pattern to the modification, it might be possible to code that pattern and not have to list every link in the table, but you haven’t shared any info about a pattern.

And, a working jsFiddle example: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/Cvj8C/.