Question

The situation:

On server A we want to display content from server B in line on server A.

The problem:

Some of the hyperlinks in the content on server B are relative to server B which makes them invalid when displayed on server A.

Given a block of HTML code that contains anchor tags like the following

<a href="/something/somwhere.html">Somewhere</a>

what would be the most efficient way to convert them to

<a href="http://server-b.com/something/somewhere.html">Somewhere</a>

There can be multiple anchor tags in the content, the one catch is that some might be absolute and I want to leave those as they are, I only want to prepend the domain of server B to the relative URLs

Answer 1

I wouldn’t do this in Java; I like to handle view-specific logic in the view layer. I’m assuming this block of code is coming from an AJAX call. So what you can do is get the HTML from the AJAX call and then do this:

jQuery(html).find("a[href]").each(function(index, value) {
  var $a = jQuery(value);
  var href = $a.attr("href");

  if(!/^http:/.test(href)) {
     $a.attr("href", "http://server-b.com" + href);
   }
});

Or if you really want to do this in Java, Lauri’s answer will work.