Use JS or jQuery to replace part of a URL

Question

Ok, I am not sure what is wrong with me, but I am trying to find and replace a portion of multiple URLs.

Basically, I have some URLs that are being dynamically added to my site. All have a class of 'newsLink' some of the links are pulling up google.docs viewer and I need to remove that.

Here is my code thus far:

$('a.newsLink').each(function(){
var lnk = $('a.newsLink').attr();
var re = new RegExp("http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=","g");
lnk.replace(re, "");
});

the links look like:

<a href='http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=myHomePage.pdf' class='newsLink' target='_blank'>

I would like to remove the first part so that the link looks like:

<a href='http://myHomePage.pdf' class='newsLink' target='_blank'>

Anyway, no luck this far...can anyone please help.

bfavaretto · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-15 00:09:41Z

2

First, you are getting all links again inside of the loop. Then, you try to get an attribute, but didn't say which one. Finally, you try to use replace without assigning the return value to anything.

This is what your code should be:

$('a.newsLink').each(function(){
    var lnk = this.href;
    this.href = lnk.replace("http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=", "");
});

Note: I'm assuming you want the links to become e.g. myHomePage.pdf, without the protocol.

edited May 15, 2012 at 0:09

answered May 14, 2012 at 23:57

bfavaretto

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3 Comments

bfavaretto Over a year ago

Okay, I dumped the regex entirely, after all it's not necessary. Now it works.

user672118 Over a year ago

Cool. Even better than mine now.

Fabrício Matté Over a year ago

Swiftly solution bro, since the URL is always a literal string (no alternation or iteration in the part which needs to be replaced), regex is unneeded. +1

user672118 · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-15 00:03:52Z

The regular expression you want is.

http:\/\/docs\.google\.com\/viewer\?url=(.+)

First off, this escapes all regular expression characters. In this case \, ., and ?. We are capturing the document using a group that matches every character ((.+)).

So our code looks like this so far.

$('a.newsLink').each(function(){
    var lnk = this.href;
    var re = /http:\/\/docs\.google\.com\/viewer\?url=(.+)/g
    this.href = lnk.replace(re, "");
});

Now we get the groups like so.

var match = re.exec(lnk);

This returns an array of the matches. Our document is now stored in match[1]. So our final code comes out to.

$('a.newsLink').each(function(){
    var lnk = this.href;
    var re = /http:\/\/docs\.google\.com\/viewer\?url=(.+)/g
    this.href = (re.exec(lnk))[1];
});

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