How can I simulate a click to an anchor tag?

user_54937 0
Viewed 108040

I want to simulate a click to an anchor tag with all extras like correct target handling.

There seems to be a "[click()][3]" method for anchor's DOM object but not all browsers support that. Firefox throws this error:

Error: anchorObj.click is not a function

It also works strangely on Opera 10 and Konqueror, causing infinite clicks to happen when it's called inside onclick handler of a surrounding div. I guess only IE8 works fine with it. Anyway I don't want it since major browsers mostly have problems with it.

I found this alternate solution for Firefox in Mozilla forums:

var evt = document.createEvent("MouseEvents"); 
evt.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 
    0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null); 
anchorObj.dispatchEvent(evt);

This seems too ugly and cumbersome for me. I don't know how compatible it is and I want to avoid writing browser specific code as much as possible.

I can't use location.href = anchorObj.href; because it doesn't handle "target" attribute. I can do some hard coding based on target's value but I'd like to avoid that as well.

There is suggestion of switching to JQuery but I'm not sure how well it handles target property either since I haven't worked with it before.

dom html javascript
5 Answers

None of the above solutions address the generic intention of the original request. What if we don't know the id of the anchor? What if it doesn't have an id? What if it doesn't even have an href parameter (e.g. prev/next icon in a carousel)? What if we want to apply the action to multiple anchors with different models in an agnostic fashion? Here's an example that does something instead of a click, then later simulates the click (for any anchor or other tag):

var clicker = null;
$('a').click(function(e){ 
    clicker=$(this); // capture the clicked dom object
    /* ... do something ... */
    e.preventDefault(); // prevent original click action
});
clicker[0].click(); // this repeats the original click. [0] is necessary.
user_34626150
Related