Internet Explorer and base elements

Internet Explorer treats the base element a bit diffently from other browser. I ran into the issue when trying to change the current page’s hash through javascript:

window.location.hash = 'some_value';

Internet explorer took the entire base URL and prepended it to the hash, resulting in an URL like http://domain.tld/http://domain.tld/#some_value. That’s clearly not my intention.

The trick lies in the href attribute for links. This actually points to the faulty long url, while its actual attribute value is only the hash:

<a id="link" href="#some_value">...</a>
<script>
// IE: http://domain.tld/#some_value
// other browser: #some_value
$('#link').attr('href');
</script>

The trick is to replace anything before the pound when reading the href value, like so:

$('#link').attr('href').replace(/^.*(?=#)/, '');

And when trying to find links pointing at #some_value to not be too restrictive with your selector:

// finds 1 in other browsers, nothing in IE
$('a[href="#some_value"]')
// works like expected in all browsers; Note the *
$('a[href*="#some_value"]')

Tricky stuff!