I've been going through and trying to find an answer to this question that fits my need but either I'm too noob to make other use cases work, or their not specific enough for my case.

Basically I want to use javascript/jQuery to replace any and all ampersands (&) on a web page that may occur in a links href with just the word "and". I've tried a couple different versions of this with no luck

var link = $("a").attr('href');
    link.replace(/&/g, "and");      

Thank you

I've been going through and trying to find an answer to this question that fits my need but either I'm too noob to make other use cases work, or their not specific enough for my case.

Basically I want to use javascript/jQuery to replace any and all ampersands (&) on a web page that may occur in a links href with just the word "and". I've tried a couple different versions of this with no luck

var link = $("a").attr('href');
    link.replace(/&/g, "and");      

Thank you

• javascript
• jquery
• html
• regex

• Rather, have you tried assigning the value back? – Wiktor Stribiżew Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 12:59
• I'm not sure what either of you mean? – DjH Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 12:59

2 Answers 2

Your current code replaces the text of the element within the jQuery object, but does not update the element(s) in the DOM.

You can instead achieve what you need by providing a function to attr() which will be executed against all elements in the matched set. Try this:

$("a").attr('href', function(i, value) {
  return value.replace(/&/g, "and");
});

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare./ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<a href="/this-&-that">link</a>
<a href="/foo-&-bar">link</a>

Sometimes when replacing &, I've found that even though I replaced &, I still have amp;. There is a fix to this:

var newUrl = "@Model.UrlToRedirect".replace(/&/gi, '%').replace(/%amp;/gi, '&');

With this solution you replace & twice and it will work. In my particular problem in an MVC app, window.location.href = @Model.UrlToRedirect, the url was already partially encoded and had a query string. I tried encoding/decoding, using Uri as the C# class, escape(), everything before ing up with this solution. The problem with using my above logic is other things could blow up the query string later. One solution is to put a hidden field or input on the form like this:

<input type="hidden" value="@Model.UrlToRedirect" id="url-redirect" />

then in your javascript:

window.location.href = document.getElementById("url-redirect").value;

in this way, javascript won't take the c# string and change it.