Is it possible to trigger a javascript to run when a particular anchor is selected?

Question

Say I have an anchor on a webpage like so:

<a name="comegetit"></a>

Is there a way of running a javascript if the page is arrived at by a link that lands on this anchor? (e.g. a link like <a href="http://myawesomewebpage.com/page#comegetit"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). I don't think there is but I would like there to be.

Answer 1

You can try to act on the onload event and check for the window.location content to extract the fragment identifier... it should work.

Answer 2

If you only expect this one string as the URL anchor:

if(window.location.hash == '#comegetit'){
  // Do your stuff.
}

If you're doing anything else complex, you can also match window.location.hash against a regular expression.

Answer 3

I use Really Simple History (http://code.google.com/p/reallysimplehistory/)

Then, in my code I do something like this:

window.dhtmlHistory.create();
window.dhtmlHistory.initialize();   
window.dhtmlHistory.addListener(function(hash){
    // this is where you process your hash and do something special
    // and totally funky
});

This even gets fired on the initial page load, if you happen to bookmark a hash tag or whatnot.

Quite useful, and abstracts away all the browser specific B.S. that comes with window.location.hash

Josh