jQuery find anchor tag with exact href

Question

I'm using the following code to find anchor tags with a matching href URL. Currently it will return anchors linking to the requested URL, eg. /images AND any links to subfolders of that url, eg. /images/recent. I would like it to only return the first if I'm only asking for /images.

$menuChildren = $menuChildren.has('a[href^="'+relativeUrl+'"],a[href^="/'+relativeUrl+'"],a[href^="'+url+'"]');

Solution 1

You're using ^=, the Attribute Starts-With selector. As its name suggests, it matches attributes whose values start with the match string. Instead, use =, the Attribute Equals selector which requires an exact match:

$menuChildren = $menuChildren.has('a[href="'+url+'"]');

Solution 2

If you want to match the href exactly then use the [href=...] version

$menuChildren = $('a[href="' + relativeUrl + '"]');

Comments

[jetlej]

AH there's the explanation I needed. Thanks, will accept the answer in 3 minutes