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The Difference Between href
and getAttribute(’href’) in JavaScript

~ 29th August 2005. · 16:19 CET · permanent link · printer friendly ~

For the HTML code <a id="aboutLink" href="/about/">about</a>, the document.getElementBy Id('aboutLink').href will return the full URL of the linked resource, for example http://somesite.com/about/.

If you want to get the exact value of the href attribute, you’d use document.getElementById('aboutLink').getAttribute('href'), which returns /about/. Yea, right – not in IE and Opera (both Win and Mac). See demo.

2 Comments

  1. I’ve been frustrated with IE’s lack for supporting that very handy method of retrieving element attributes for a long time, frustrating.

  2. Check out the solution posted here:
    link to quirksmode.org. This saved my life.

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