HTML link with href that refers to text?

Question

This is a simple yes or no question (probably no), googling didn't seem to give me a straight answer. Say you have a link that is

<a href="www.stackoverflow.com">www.stackoverflow.com</a>

Is it possible to make something like

<a href=self.text>www.stackoverflow.com</a>

without using anything else (obviously, no scripts)? Is there any kind of shortcut?

That's only possible with JavaScript, I'd imagine. Though, with CSS you could sort of do it the other way round, take the `href` attribute and make that the link text. (Though it wouldn't generate a clickable text, I think.) — David Thomas, Sep 18 '12 at 21:12
@DavidThomas - A quick test shows that it generates clickable text in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, but not Chrome. — Alohci, Sep 18 '12 at 23:01

score 17 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 01 '22 at 11:47

17

No, you need to have both the href attribute and a value between the a tags. Without using any scripts, it's not possible to refer to its own contents.

edited Feb 01 '22 at 11:47

Adil Hussain

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answered Sep 18 '12 at 21:10

jtheman

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 23 '23 at 16:28

create an script/function for that

put a class to all of your anchors (i.e. "anchorTextAsHref" ), get all of them and modify the DOM structure,

just placing the text equals to whatever href has.

    let anchors=document.getElementsByClassName("anchorTextAsHref");
    for (let i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
        anchors[i].text = anchors[i].href;
    }

score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 18 '12 at 21:55

-2

Use anchor link Useful Tips Section Create a link to the "Useful Tips Section" inside the same document:

Visit the Useful Tips Section

answered Sep 18 '12 at 21:55

Shoaib Ud-Din

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score -3 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 18 '12 at 21:14

-3

I think you're looking for the Anchor Tag . You can use the syntax to link to it, if you reference it by using a <a href="link"> somewhere in the body.

Look here at the bottom for some examples:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

edited Sep 18 '12 at 21:14

j08691

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answered Sep 18 '12 at 21:12

John Swaringen

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Nope, not looking for an anchor. Just looking for a way to get the href to equal the text. Thanks, though. – user1583044 Sep 18 '12 at 21:15
I was simply wondering if it was possible (without Javascript) to have a link's URL lifted from its text. The answer is no. – user1583044 Sep 18 '12 at 21:20

HTML link with href that refers to text?

4 Answers4

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