Question

I’m using someone else’s app and want to change the innerHTML in between any < a>< /a> tag that has a certain href. But these links don’t have a class or ID associated with them and I can’t edit the code to give them classes or ID’s. Is there a way to grab a tag by its href in JavaScript? I wanted to do something similar to this:

var theLink = document.getElementByHref("example.com");

Otherwise, if that is not possible, can I loop through all the links in the page and choose the ones that have the certain href and innerHTML I’m looking for?

Answer 1

You can use a DOM3-attribute-selector (jQuery doc) to get all elements that contain a certain text in their href attribute. It would look like

$('a[href*="example.com"]')

However, that might not be what you actually want – not only urls to that domain might contain this string. You might do something like begins-with:

$('a[href^="http://example.com"]')

but to get an exact and possibly more complex match, you don’t get around a custom filter:

$('a[href]').filter( function() {
     return this.hostname == "example.com";
     // or check other properties of the anchor element
})