How to get "raw" href contents in JavaScript

Question

I am trying to write a GreaseMonkey script in which I want to find all of the links that are relative links. It seemed to me that the way to do that would be to match the contents of href against /^https?:///.

But I find that when I access the anchor's href attribute, it's always normalized or cooked into a form that contains "http". That is, if the HTML contains:

<a id="rel" href="/relative/link">inner</a>

accessing

document.getElementById("rel").href

returns

http://example.com/relative/link

How can I access the raw data in the href attribute?

Alternately, is there a better way to find relative links?

J-P, the question was a bit unclear at the beginning. At the time I posted my comment it was not clear whether he tried using the `getAttribute` method or just the `href` property. — Ionuț G. Stan, Oct 11 '09 at 15:10

score 66 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 11 '09 at 15:07

66

Try the getAttribute method instead.

answered Oct 11 '09 at 15:07

Gumbo

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2

Unfortunately, IE7 seems to return the fully qualified URL even with this approach. – Jørn Schou-Rode Jan 14 '10 at 21:37
1

For those interested, [this SO](https://stackoverflow.com/a/10280487/2518231) answer has more information as to why `.href` and `.getAttibute('href')` return different values on most browsers. – Matthew Herbst Jun 22 '19 at 19:27

score 37 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 11 '09 at 15:09

Typical. I figured it out myself almost immediately after posting the question.

instead of:

anchor.href

use:

anchor.getAttribute("href")

Of course, it took me longer to type in this answer than it took everyone else to answer it. (Damn, you people are fast.)

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 09 '19 at 01:11

Here's a code snippet you could run to test.

const anchors = document.getElementsByTagName('a');

for (let anchor of anchors) {
  let hrefFullPath = anchor.href;
  let hrefRelativePath = anchor.attributes.href.value;

  console.log('hrefFullPath', hrefFullPath);
  console.log('hrefRelativePath', hrefRelativePath);
}

Let's say, you are at http://localhost:4200, and this is your document as you have shown in the question.

<a id="rel" href="/relative/link">inner</a>

This anchor's attribute value of href is:

document.getElementById('rel').attributes.href.value => /relative/link

And anchor's href value is:

document.getElementById('rel').href =>  http://localhost:4200/relative/link

I hope it helps.

How to get "raw" href contents in JavaScript

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