- How to trigger click event on a link using jQuery
- Example
- Example
- Example
- Method 2
- Related Articles
- HTML Links
- HTML Links — Hyperlinks
- HTML Links — Syntax
- Example
- HTML Links — The target Attribute
- Example
- Absolute URLs vs. Relative URLs
- Example
- Absolute URLs
- Relative URLs
- HTML Links — Use an Image as a Link
- Example
- Link to an Email Address
- Example
- Button as a Link
- Example
- Link Titles
- How to Add an HTML Button that Acts Like a Link
- Add an inline onclick event
- Example of adding an onclick event to the tag:
- Example of adding an onclick event to the tag:
- Use the action or formaction attribute.
- Example of creating a button acting like a link with the action attribute:
- Example of opening a link from a button in a new window:
- Example of creating a button acting like a link with the formaction attribute:
- Style the link as a button
- Example of styling a link as a button with CSS:
- Example of styling a link as a button and adding a hover effect:
- How about the accessibility?
- How to Make Button onclick in HTML
- How to add URL to the window object
- Example of adding URL to the window object:
- Example of using a button onclick to know the current date:
- Example of adding an onclick event:
How to trigger click event on a link using jQuery
The purpose of having links on a web page is to make it possible for web visitors to navigate through the website from one page to another or to open and download linked files.
A HTML link is created by simply using anchor tags, putting the destination address/URL in the href attribute and the link text in between the opening and closing tags.
The link is by default meant to be clicked by the users directly for navigation. However, for some reason, you may have a scenario where you want the link to be clicked indirectly and programmatically when a certain action on the web page occurs.
In such a situation you will need to trigger a click event on a link which can easily be achieved through the use of jQuery click() function.
Here is how to trigger a click event on any HTML element.
The "selector" can be an HTML element (eg. a, p, img, etc), a class, or an id for an element.
However, when it comes to links $(«a»).click() , $(«#linkid»).click() and $(«.linkclass»).click() do not work. It’s seems like jQuery completely ignores the link href making the click to behave differently from how you would expect it to do.
To work around this, always add a [0] after the bracket containing the selector in order for it to work. Using index [0] will make jQuery Object to regular JS Object which will use the native non-jquery click() method.
Example
The above will work perfectly and redirect the user to the destination href url as intended. The [0] specifies which link the click event should work on, especially if you have more than one link on the page. In this case, it is the first link on the page that will get clicked since array indexes start with zero (0).
If the page has multiple links and you want to trigger the click event to the second link, use $(«a»)[1] instead, $(«a»)[2] for the third link, and so on and so forth.
Adding $(«a»)[0].click() directly inside the jQuery ready function will result in triggering of the link click event immediately the page loads and thus cause immediate redirection.
To prevent this, you should put the click event trigger code inside a function so as to be triggered only when a certain desired action occurs on the page.
Example
In the code below, we want to trigger the link click event only when someone clicks on the paragraph.
Sample heading here
Sample paragraph text
Visit Google
Clicking on the paragraph above will trigger a click event on the link «Visit Google», and the page will be redirected to the Google homepage.
It is much better to reference the link using its id or class as a selector especially when there are many links as it will be easy to identify it. When using the id as the selector, you reference it with a # eg. «#google». If you use the class selector, reference it with a dot (.) eg «.google».
Example
Sample heading here
Sample paragraph text
Google Bing Duckduckgo
Click on the paragraph above will trigger a click event on the link which in turn will redirect the page to Bing’s homepage. In this case, you will only have to use array index zero(0) ie. [0] as each link has its own id, and that it’s always the first index for that selector.
Method 2
The code below will work perfectly.
Below is another way to implement the above code:
That’s all! Hopes this helped you.
Related Articles
HTML Links
Links are found in nearly all web pages. Links allow users to click their way from page to page.
HTML Links — Hyperlinks
HTML links are hyperlinks.
You can click on a link and jump to another document.
When you move the mouse over a link, the mouse arrow will turn into a little hand.
Note: A link does not have to be text. A link can be an image or any other HTML element!
HTML Links — Syntax
The link text is the part that will be visible to the reader.
Clicking on the link text, will send the reader to the specified URL address.
Example
This example shows how to create a link to W3Schools.com:
By default, links will appear as follows in all browsers:
- An unvisited link is underlined and blue
- A visited link is underlined and purple
- An active link is underlined and red
Tip: Links can of course be styled with CSS, to get another look!
HTML Links — The target Attribute
By default, the linked page will be displayed in the current browser window. To change this, you must specify another target for the link.
The target attribute specifies where to open the linked document.
The target attribute can have one of the following values:
- _self — Default. Opens the document in the same window/tab as it was clicked
- _blank — Opens the document in a new window or tab
- _parent — Opens the document in the parent frame
- _top — Opens the document in the full body of the window
Example
Use target=»_blank» to open the linked document in a new browser window or tab:
Absolute URLs vs. Relative URLs
Both examples above are using an absolute URL (a full web address) in the href attribute.
A local link (a link to a page within the same website) is specified with a relative URL (without the «https://www» part):
Example
Absolute URLs
W3C
Relative URLs
HTML Images
CSS Tutorial
HTML Links — Use an Image as a Link
To use an image as a link, just put the tag inside the tag:
Example
Link to an Email Address
Use mailto: inside the href attribute to create a link that opens the user’s email program (to let them send a new email):
Example
Button as a Link
To use an HTML button as a link, you have to add some JavaScript code.
JavaScript allows you to specify what happens at certain events, such as a click of a button:
Example
Tip: Learn more about JavaScript in our JavaScript Tutorial.
Link Titles
The title attribute specifies extra information about an element. The information is most often shown as a tooltip text when the mouse moves over the element.
How to Add an HTML Button that Acts Like a Link
There are several ways of creating an HTML button, that acts like a link (i.e., clicking on it the user is redirected to the specified URL). You can choose one of the following methods to add a link to the HTML button.
Add an inline onclick event
You can add an inline onclick event to the tag.
Example of adding an onclick event to the tag:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> button onclick="window.location.href='https://w3docs.com';"> Click Here button> body> html>
It is also possible to add an inline onclick event to the tag within the element.
Example of adding an onclick event to the tag:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> form> input type="button" onclick="window.location.href='https://www.w3docs.com';" value="w3docs" /> form> body> html>
Use the action or formaction attribute.
Another way of creating a button that acts like a link is using the action or formaction attribute within the element.
Example of creating a button acting like a link with the action attribute:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> form action="https://www.w3docs.com/"> button type="submit">Click me button> form> body> html>
To open the link in a new tab, add target=»_blank» .
Example of opening a link from a button in a new window:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> form action="https://www.w3docs.com/" method="get" target="_blank"> button type="submit">Click me button> form> body> html>
Since there is no form and no data is submitted, this may be semantically incorrect. However, this markup is valid.
Example of creating a button acting like a link with the formaction attribute:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> form> button type="submit" formaction="https://www.w3docs.com">Click me button> form> body> html>
The formaction attribute is only used with buttons having type=»submit» . Since this attribute is HTML5-specific, its support in old browsers may be poor.
Style the link as a button
Add a link styled as a button with CSS properties. A href attribute is the required attribute of the tag. It specifies a link on the web page or a place on the same page where the user navigates after clicking on the link.
Example of styling a link as a button with CSS:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> style> .button < background-color: #1c87c9; border: none; color: white; padding: 20px 34px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; display: inline-block; font-size: 20px; margin: 4px 2px; cursor: pointer; > style> head> body> a href="https://www.w3docs.com/" class="button">Click Here a> body> html>
Let’s see one more example.
Example of styling a link as a button and adding a hover effect:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> style> .button < display: inline-block; padding: 10px 20px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; color: #ffffff; background-color: #7aa8b7; border-radius: 6px; outline: none; transition: 0.3s; > .button:hover < background-color: #c2c7c7; > style> head> body> a class="button" href="https://www.w3docs.com/learn-html/html-button-tag.html">HTML button tag a> body> html>
How about the accessibility?
Let’s take accessibility into our account for the last example. Here are some improvements to make the code more accessible:
If the button contained an image, it would be important to provide an alt attribute to make the image accessible to screen readers. Since this button doesn’t have an image, we don’t need to worry about this.
Adding a label to the button will help users who rely on assistive technology understand the purpose of the button. We can do this by wrapping the button text in a element and adding an aria-label attribute to the button.
To improve visibility for users with low vision, we can increase the contrast between the text color and background color of the button. We can achieve this by making the background color darker or the text color lighter.
Adding a focus style to the button will help users who navigate using the keyboard to see which element is currently focused. We can add a simple border to the button to achieve this.
Here’s the updated code with these improvements:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> style> .button < display: inline-block; padding: 10px 20px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; color: #ffffff; background-color: #3c5d6e; border-radius: 6px; outline: none; transition: 0.3s; border: 2px solid transparent; > .button:hover, .button:focus < background-color: #c2c7c7; border-color: #7aa8b7; > style> head> body> a class="button" href="https://www.w3docs.com/learn-html/html-button-tag.html" aria-label="Learn about the HTML button tag">span>HTML button tag span> a> body> html>
How to Make Button onclick in HTML
The onclick attribute is an event attribute that is supported by all browsers. It appears when the user clicks on a button element. If you want to make a button onclick, you need to add the onclick event attribute to the element.
How to add URL to the window object
The button onclick runs a script when the user clicks a button. Let’s see an example where we have a button, clicking on which you’ll go to our website. To achieve this, we’ll just add the URL of the website to the window object.
Example of adding URL to the window object:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> button onclick="window.location.href='https://w3docs.com';">Click Here button> body> html>
You can also use a button onclick in order to know the current date just by adding «getElementById(‘demo’).innerHTML=Date()» to the onclick event.
Example of using a button onclick to know the current date:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> p>Click the button to see the current date. p> button onclick="getElementById('demo').innerHTML=Date()">What day is today? button> p id="demo"> p> body> html>
The onclick event is used to call a function when an element is clicked. That is why it is mostly used with the JavaScript function. Let’s consider an example where you need to click the button to set a function that will output a message in a element with id=»demo».
Example of adding an onclick event:
html> html> head> title>Title of the document title> head> body> p>There is a hidden message for you. Click to see it. p> button onclick="myFunction()">Click me! button> p id="demo"> p> script> function myFunction( ) < document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = "Hello Dear Visitor! We are happy that you've chosen our website to learn programming languages. We're sure you'll become one of the best programmers in your country. Good luck to you!"; > script> body> html>