Passing variables to jQuery from links.

Question

I am remaking a page on the admin section of a website I administer so that it uses jQuery and AJAX. On one of the pages I have a list of items. Next to each item there is a link which is something like this:

<a href="delete.php?id=48" class="del_link">delete</a>

If I give these links a class I can easily apply a jQuery function to all of them but they would all call the same function in the same way. My question is: what is the best way for the function to get the item's id without including JavaScript inline with the html?

Update: Thanks for the pointers, everyone. I've ended up using this:

$(".del_link").click(function(){
    var del_link = $(this).attr('href');
    $("#results").load(del_link, function (){
        $("#results").show().delay().fadeTo(2000, 0);
    })
})

The php file that the ajax calls responds in different ways if it's been requested by ajax or normally - if it's ajax it outputs a response (e.g. "Item was deleted successfully") which can be displayed in the #results div. If someone has javascript disabled the client will be directed to the same php page but it will redirect them once the item is removed.

Answer 1

Quick and dirty:

$('.del_link').click(function(){
    var id = $(this).attr('href').split('=')[1];
    // Do something with the ID here
});

Be warned, this won't work if the link URL has more than one querystring parameter. In that scenario you'd have to do some slightly more complicated parsing of the attr('href') value.

Answer 2

When you add an onClick handler then this will be the link.

Examine the href attribute (use this.href) and parse the ID.

Answer 3

well, you can get the href easily enough:

var id = $('.del_link a').attr('href');

then just parse the id out.

Answer 4

In HTML 5 you can use data attributes. Something like

<a href="delete.php?id=48" class="del_link" data-id='48'>delete</a> 

and jQuery

$("a.del_link").each(function(){
   var id = $(this).attr('data-id');
});

Read this article on HTML 5 data attributes