[Corey Bryant]

Working off BigBison's post in since target is not allowed, I started to mess with my limited knowledge of JavaScript and came up with

function externalLinks() {
 if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
 var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
 for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
  if (!anchors[i].getAttribute("href").match(("example")))
    {anchors[i].target = "_blank";}
        }
}
window.onload = externalLinks;

to also be able to use absolute links for your own domain (www.example.com) and it open in the same window. But if you use http://www.iwdn.net, it would open in a new window.

This seems to work in Internet Explorer 7.0 but not in Firefox 2.0. Can someone get it to work properly or is it not possible?

Thanks!

[Gerrit]

I've been using this for some time now:

function externalLinks() {
 if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
 var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
 for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
   var anchor = anchors[i];
   if (anchor.getAttribute("href") && 
       anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external")
     anchor.target = "_blank";
 }
}
window.onload = externalLinks;

A link to a page to open in a new window looks like this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com" rel="external">Link text</a>

I didn't code it - I found it somewhere.

[Corey Bryant]

That one was what I was using as well (I was Strict but now I need to be Transitional), but the code BigBison created, you no longer need to even use

rel="external"

I am using that one currently on a site but also needing to use absolute hyperlinks on the same domain name and was hoping to be able to get around using the rel attribute

[Gerrit]

Ah OK..
With this one you can use absolute links without a problem as you know. The rel="external" thingy doesn't bother me.

[inimino]

  if (!anchors[i].getAttribute("href").match(("example")))

The trouble here is that this matches only when the href attribute contains "example", which it often won't.

<a href="page_2.html">next page</a> this will open as an external link.

There is a bug in IE, where getAttribute('href') returns the absolute URL rather than the actual href attribute, which is why this code works in that browser, but according to the DOM the getAttribute() function must return the actual value of the attribute, reasonably enough.

There are two ways to work around IE's incorrect implementation of the standard, one is to use a magical second argument to getAttribute(), which means, "if you are IE please follow the standard," and the other would be to use .href instead of .getAttribute('href'). The .href property returns the absolute URL in every case according to DOM 2 HTML, and is implemented correctly even by IE.

So either of these might work:

if(anchors[i].getAttribute('href',2).match('^http://'))
if(!anchors[i].href.match('example.com/'))

Matching against ^http:// (the ^ matches the beginning of the string) is the cleanest and doesn't need to be modified to work on other sites. It won't work, of course, if there are absolute URLs to other pages on the same site.

EDIT after reading post #3:
Since you have absolute URLs on the same domain, unless you can change them, you'll have to use .href and look for the actual domain.

[Corey Bryant]

Thanks!

function externalLinks() {
 if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
 var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
 for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
  if(!anchors[i].href.match('loudworx.com/'))
    {anchors[i].target = "_blank";}
        }
}
window.onload = externalLinks;

seems to have worked. I know it was easy enough to add that

rel="external"

but on some sites it was easier to hopefully come up with something else