Question

I’d like to fire up some script if the user is visiting my site’s root url.

For example, I want to do something in my view when the user is visiting

• www.example.com
• example.com
• www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com

… [Various combinations of the above.]

And not for www.example.com/anything else.
What is the safest way to check this in a view page of a ASP.NET MVC 3 [Razor] web site and javascript? Also, is there any way to find out using only javascript?
Thank you.

Answer 1

The easiest JavaScript method is:

var is_root = location.pathname == "/"; //Equals true if we're at the root

Even http://example.com/?foo=bar#hash will produce the right result, since the pathname excludes the query string and location hash.

Have a look:

http://anything-but-a-slash/                  Root
                           /?querystring      Root
                           /#hash             Root
                           /page              Not root

If you have index file(s) at your root folder, have a look at the following example:

var is_root =/^\/(?:|index\.aspx?)$/i.test(location.pathname);

The previous line is using a regular expression. Special characters have to be escaped, the /i postfix makes the pattern case-insensitive. If you want the case to match, omit the i flag.

The same regular expression presented graphically: