Using jQuery to check if a link is internal or external

Question

I want to write a script which can determine whether a link is internal or external. This is simple from my perspective, all internal links are relative, so they start with a /. All external links start with an http:// - all good so far. However I can't figure out how to do a ':contains()' on anything other than text - how can a search for a string within an attribute?

Once I can do this I'm happy to add target _blank myself, unless you know a better way to do it

Answer 1

You could use the attribute^=value syntax to find hrefs that start with http or /:

$('a[href^=http]') // external

$('a[href^=/]') // internal