I am thinking of to add a javascript function to capture all the <a> click events inside a html page.
So I am adding a global function that governs all the <a> click events, but not adding onclick to each (neither using .onclick= nor attachEvent(onclick...) nor inline onclick=). I will leave each <a> as simple as <a href="someurl"> within the html without touching them.
I tried window.onclick = function (e) {...}
but that just captures all the clicks
How do I specify only the clicks on <a> and to extract the links inside <a> that is being clicked?
Restriction: I don't want to use any exra libraries like jQuery, just vanilla javascript.
11 Answers
Use event delegation:
document.addEventListener(`click`, e => {
const origin = e.target.closest(`a`);
if (origin) {
console.clear();
console.log(`You clicked ${origin.href}`);
}
});<div>
<a href="#l1">some link</a>
<div><a href="#l2"><div><i>some other (nested) link</i></div></a></div>
</div>[edit 2020/08/20] Modernized
You can handle all click using window.onclick and then filter using event.target
Example as you asked:
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onclick = function(e) { alert(e.target);};
</script>
</head>
<body>
<a href="">google</a>
<a href="">yahoo</a>
<a href="">facebook</a>
</body>
</html>
window.onclick = function (e) {
if (e.target.localName == 'a') {
console.log('a tag clicked!');
}
}
your idea to delegate the event to the window and then check if the "event.target" is a link, is one way to go (better would be document.body). The trouble here is that it won't work if you click on a child node of your element. Think:
<a href="#"><b>I am bold</b></a>
the target would be the <b> element, not the link. This means checking for e.target won't work. So, you would have to crawl up all the dom tree to check if the clicked element is a descendant of a <a> element.
Another method that requires less computation on every click, but costs more to initialize would be to get all <a> tags and attach your event in a loop:
var links = Array.prototype.slice.call(
document.getElementsByTagName('a')
);
var count = links.length;
for(var i = 0; i < count; i++) {
links[i].addEventListener('click', function(e) {
//your code here
});
}
(PS: why do I convert the HTMLCollection to array? here's the answer.)
You need to take into account that a link can be nested with other elements and want to traverse the tree back to the 'a' element. This works for me:
window.onclick = function(e) {
var node = e.target;
while (node != undefined && node.localName != 'a') {
node = node.parentNode;
}
if (node != undefined) {
console.log(node.href);
/* Your link handler here */
return false; // stop handling the click
} else {
return true; // handle other clicks
}
}
See e.g.
You can also try using this:
var forEach = Array.prototype.forEach;
var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
forEach.call(links, function (link) {
link.onclick = function () {
console.log('Clicked');
}
});
It works, I just tested!
Working Demo:
Somewhere in comments you mentioned you want to get the 'href' value you can do that with this:
var forEach = Array.prototype.forEach;
var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
forEach.call(links, function (link) {
link.onclick = function () {
console.log(link.href); //use link.href for the value
}
});
Demo:
Try jQuery and
$('a').click(function(event) { *your code here* });
In this function you can extract href value in this way:
$(this).attr('href')
Some accepted answers dont work with nested elements like:
<a href="..."><font><u>link</u></font></a>
There is a basic solution for most cases:
var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for(var i in links)
{
links[i].onclick = function(e){
e.preventDefault();
var href = this.href;
// ... do what you need here.
}
}
If anybody is looking for the typed version (TypeScript, using Kooilnc's answer), here it is:
document.addEventListener("click", (e: Event) => {
if(!e.target) { return; }
if(!(e.target instanceof Element)) { return; }
const origin = e.target.closest("a");
if(!origin || !origin.href) { return; }
console.log(`You clicked ${origin.href}`);
});
I guess this simple code will work with jquery.
$("a").click(function(){
alert($(this).attr('href'));
});
Without JQuery:
window.onclick = function(e) {
if(e.target.localName=='a')
alert(e.target);
};
The above will produce the same result.
Very simple :
document.getElementById("YOUR_ID").onclick = function (e) {...}
The selector is what you want to select so lets say you have button called
<a href="#" id="button1">Button1</a>
The code to capure this is:
document.getElementById("button1").onclick = function (e) { alert('button1 clicked'); }
Hope that helps.
