Trigger a link on a Anchor link with Javascript (without jquery)?

Question

Is it possible to trigger a click on a anchor link via javascript only (not Jquery - long story!).

We want to pass an anchor link's id into a function which will trigger the click, but have no idea how to trigger a click without jquery!

Thanks

Answer 1

In some browsers, you can just do something like document.getElementById(myelement).click() (I'm fairly sure this is the case of IE only, but it could be available in more).

Since it's an <a> tag you want to click, its default click event can be emulated fairly easily:

function clickLink(id) {
    var tag = document.getElementById(id);
    if( tag.onclick) {
        var def = tag.onclick();
        if( !def) return false; // event cancelled by handler
    }
    window.location.href = tag.getAttribute("href");
}

Note that this doesn't take into account event added with addEventListener or any other events than the .onclick property and onClick attribute, and it doesn't open a new window/tab if the user Ctrl+Clicks or MMB-clicks.