Get rid of characters in url href

Question

I have a link like this:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Stan&sa=U&ei=UULHUIIdzPnhBOKMgPgJ&ved=0CCIQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNGyCikDkoZMnnuqGo6vjMQ6b5lZkw

I would like to get rid of everything starting at '&' So this will give me a clean url:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Stan

I know how to replace href like this:

$('a').each(function() {
      $(this).attr("href", function(index, old) {
            return old.replace("something", "something else");
      });
});

But I can't figure out how to get rid of everything starting at a certain character.

Please consider [this](http://stackoverflow.com/a/2541083/227646) answer on Stack Overflow. Never mind. Both the answers below are better suited than what I had. — kush, Dec 11 '12 at 14:38
is that even a valid URI without a `?` for the first qs param? — jbabey, Dec 11 '12 at 14:41
@Youss if any server code (.NET, PHP, etc) attempts to retrieve any querystring values it will throw exceptions. The querystring portion of a URI must begin with `?`. [Reference](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string#Structure) — jbabey, Dec 11 '12 at 14:52

Jay Blanchard · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-21T15:01:30.870

8

You can use substr() and indexOf() to get a specific portion of the URL, from the beginning of the URL string up until the point the first ampersand is encountered.

  var href = $(this).attr('href'); 
  var url = href.substr(0, href.indexOf('&'));

edited Jan 21 '16 at 15:01

answered Dec 11 '12 at 14:39

Jay Blanchard

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`String.prototype.indexOf` will not work if there is no '&' in the href! It will return -1 and you will be left with empty string! – danronmoon Dec 12 '12 at 12:27
True, the OP should test for that. – Jay Blanchard Dec 12 '12 at 12:49

danronmoon · Answer 2 · 2012-12-12T12:35:17.940

1

Use String.prototype.split instead. It splits a string by character into an array. The most important part is that if that character is missing (in your case, '&'), it will put the entire string in the first array index anyway.

// String.prototype.indexOf:
var href = 'http://www.noAmpersandHere.com/',
    url  = href.substr(0, href.indexOf('&'));  // ''

// String.prototype.split:    
var href = 'http://www.noAmpersandHere.com/',
    url  = href.split('&');  // ['http://www.noAmpersandHere.com/']
    url  = url[0];  // 'http://www.noAmpersandHere.com/'

edited Dec 12 '12 at 12:35

answered Dec 11 '12 at 14:39

danronmoon

3,814
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Would you care to elaborate? – Konrad Viltersten Dec 11 '12 at 15:00

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 11 '12 at 14:41

First: consider that the parameters list starts with ? and not with &

The anchor element you are handling already have the entire url parsed and correctly divided. You need only to access to the correct anchor property:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/HTMLAnchorElement

Get rid of characters in url href

3 Answers3