Fix Anchor URLs Using MooTools 1.2

By  on  

The administrative control panel I build for my customers features FCKEditor, a powerful WYSIWYG editor that allows the customer to add links, bold text, create ordered lists, and so on. I provide training and documentation to the customers but many times they simply forget to include the "http://" when add links into their content. Essentially, they end up with links that look like:

	<a href="www.davidwalsh.name">Click here</a>

Obviously, that's a problem. Luckily MooTools 1.2 provides a quick fix for that problem for website users.

The MooTools 1.2 Code

window.addEvent('domready', function() {
	$('fix-links').addEvent('click', function() {
		$$('a[href^=www.]').each(function(el) {
			el.set('href','http://www.' + el.get('href').split('www.')[1]);
		});
		alert('Links fixed.');
	});
});

The above solutions is NOT the best solution because it doesn't correct what the search engines see. Have a PHP solution? Submit it! The best solution is to fix the link within the FCKEditor plugin at the time the user adds the link. The code above, however, will buy you a little time to go in and fix any existing errant links.

Recent Features

  • By
    6 Things You Didn&#8217;t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Link Fading

    We all know that we can set a different link color (among other properties) on the hover event, but why not show a little bit more dynamism by making the original color fade to the next? Using MooTools 1.2, you can achieve that effect. The MooTools...

  • By
    Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print

    I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...

Discussion

  1. Steinmann

    We are using FCKEditor, and it adds the http part automatically.

    We do have a php domparser that goes thru the whole thing fixing other things tho. Like adding lytebox links to some images etc…

  2. Does Mootools implement the CSS not() selector? If so, then you can use $$('a:not([^=http]').each...

    Good tip!

  3. Jordan

    @Eric Wendelin: That wouldn’t be ideal in a case where the link is meant to be relative.

  4. Caleb

    If there’s a way, it’d be great to have the Javascript check for url errors, and if it finds any, it’ll post the info to a php script, changing the url(s) permanently. I’ve been trying to create a script like that.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!