Force page reload with html anchors (#) - HTML & JS

Question

Say I'm on a page called /example#myanchor1 where myanchor is an anchor in the page. I'd like to link to /example#myanchor2, but force the page to reload while doing so.

The reason is that I run js to detect the anchor from the url at the page load. The problem [normally expected behavior] here though, is that the browser just sends me to that specific anchor on the page without reloading the page.

How would I go about doing so (JS OK). Thanks!

Answer 1

What's the point of using client-side JS if you're going to keep reloading the page all the time anyways? It might be a better idea to monitor the hash for changes even when the page is not reloading.

This page has a hash monitor library and a jQuery plugin to go with it.

If you really want to reload the page, why not use a query string (?foo) instead of a hash?

Answer 2

I would suggest monitoring the anchor in the URL to avoid a reload, that's pretty much the point of using anchors for control-flow. But still here goes. I'd say the easiest way to force a reload using a simple anchor-link would be to use

<a href="?dummy=$random#myanchor2"></a>

where in place of $random insert a random number (assuming "dummy" is not interpreted server side). I'm sure there's a way to reload the page after setting the anchor, but it's probably more difficult then simply reacting to the anchor being set and do the stuff you need at that point.

Then again, if you reload the page this way, you can just put myanchor2 as a query parameter instead, and render your stuff server side.

Edit
Note that the link above will reload in all circumstances, if you only need to reload if you're not already on the page, you need to have the dummy variable be more predictable, like so

<a href="?dummy=myanchor2#myanchor2"></a>

I would still recommend just monitoring the hash though.

Answer 3

Another option that hasn't been mentioned yet is to bind event listeners (using jQuery for example) to the links that you care about (might be all of them, might not be) and get the listener to call whatever function you use.

Edit after comment

For example, you might have this code in your HTML:

<a href="example#myanchor1" class="myHash">example1</a>
<a href="example#myanchor2" class="myHash">example2</a>
<a href="example#myanchor3" class="myHash">example3</a>

Then, you could add the following code to bind and respond to the links:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $('a.myHash').click(function(e) {
        e.preventDefault(); // Prevent the browser from handling the link normally, this stops the page from jumping around. Remove this line if you do want it to jump to the anchor as normal.
        var linkHref = $(this).attr('href'); // Grab the URL from the link
        if (linkHref.indexOf("#") != -1) { // Check that there's a # character
            var hash = linkHref.substr(linkHref.indexOf("#") + 1); // Assign the hash to a variable (it will contain "myanchor1" etc
            myFunctionThatDoesStuffWithTheHash(hash); // Call whatever javascript you use when the page loads and pass the hash to it
            alert(hash); // Just for fun.
        }
    });
</script>

Note that I'm using the jQuery class selector to select the links I want to 'monitor', but you can use whatever selector you want.

Depending on how your existing code works, you may need to either modify how/what you pass to it (perhaps you will need to build a full URL including the new hash and pass that across - eg. http://www.example.com/example#myanchor1), or modify the existing code to accept what you pass to it from you new code.