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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T04:44:47+00:00

I’m looking over some previous developers code and I come across this line: location.href

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I’m looking over some previous developers code and I come across this line:

location.href = '#' + variable;

Which has the effect of updating location.hash. Remove the ‘#’ and of course it redirects to the non-existent url. Playing around a bit it seems I can set the hash via location.href as long as the value starts with ‘#’. This line or similar is used a lot, but I can’t seem to find any documentation the supports this behavior of it updating location.hash by setting location.href this way.

I would like to see something showing this isn’t just a happy accident that this works so I don’t have to re-code all the situations where this is used. Anything you can link me to would help.

Would it be better to just changes these to properly set the location.hash anyway?

Thnks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    At a guess this is because setting location.href to value is supposed to have the same behaviour as clicking a link whose href=value would; it’s not supposed to replace the contents of the address bar, because then you’d have to build absolute URLs everytime you wanted to use location.href.

    Assigning values to location and location.href was apparently there back in Javascript 1.0, so it’s entirely possible this wasn’t properly specified anywhere – neither the Mozilla or Microsoft documentation go into detail. HTML5 specifies the behaviour, most likely retroactively.

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