javascripthrefgetelementsbytagname

JavaScript getElement by href?

I've got the script below

var els = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for(var i = 0, l = els.length; i < l; i++) {
  var el = els[i];
  el.innerHTML = el.innerHTML.replace(/link1/gi, 'dead link');
}

However this searches through the page and takes about 20 seconds to do it as there are LOTS of links.

However I only need to target the a's that have a specific href, for eg. http://domain.example/

So ideally I'd like to be able to do this in a similar fashion to jQuery, but without using a framework. So something like

var els = document.getElementsByTagName("a[href='http://domain.example']");

How would I go about doing this so it only searches the objects with that matching href?

Solution

  • 2016 update

    It's been over 4 years since this question was posted and things progressed quite a bit.

    You can't use:

    var els = document.getElementsByTagName("a[href='http://domain.example']");

    but what you can use is:

    var els = document.querySelectorAll("a[href='http://domain.example']");

    (Note: see below for browser support)

    which would make the code from your question work exactly as you expect:

    for (var i = 0, l = els.length; i < l; i++) {
  var el = els[i];
  el.innerHTML = el.innerHTML.replace(/link1/gi, 'dead link');
}

    You can even use selectors like a[href^='http://domain.example'] if you want all links that start with 'http://domain.example':

    var els = document.querySelectorAll("a[href^='http://domain.example']");

for (var i = 0, l = els.length; i < l; i++) {
  var el = els[i];
  el.innerHTML = el.innerHTML.replace(/link/gi, 'dead link');
}

    See: DEMO

    Browser support

    The browser support according to Can I use as of June 2016 looks pretty good:

    caniuse.com/queryselector (See: http://caniuse.com/queryselector for up to date info)

    There is no support in IE6 and IE7 but IE6 is already dead and IE7 soon will be with its 0.68% market share.

    IE8 is over 7 years old and it partially supports querySelectorAll - by "partially" I mean that you can use CSS 2.1 selectors like [attr], [attr="val"], [attr~="val"], [attr|="bar"] and a small subset of CSS 3 selectors which luckily include: [attr^=val], [attr$=val], and [attr*=val] so it seems that IE8 is fine with my examples above.

    IE9, IE10 and IE11 all support querySelectorAll with no problems, as do Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and all other major browser - both desktop and mobile.

    In other words, it seems that we can safely start to use querySelectorAll in production.

    More info

    For more info, see:

    See also this answer for the difference between querySelectorAll, querySelector, queryAll and query and when they were removed from the DOM specification.