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
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    I&#8217;m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with jQuery JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

  • By
    WebKit Marquee CSS:  Bringin&#8217; Sexy Back

    We all joke about the days of Web yesteryear.  You remember them:  stupid animated GIFs (flames and "coming soon" images, most notably), lame counters, guestbooks, applets, etc.  Another "feature" we thought we had gotten rid of was the marquee.  The marquee was a rudimentary, javascript-like...

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!