Can I change the URL string in the address bar using javascript

Question

I've a link on my webpage, say 'about'. Clicking on it loads a particular div without refreshing the whole page using jquery .load(). This does not change the URL string in the browser address bar.

The same page can be accessed by going to www.mydomain.com/?page=about.

So what I want to do is, when the user clicks on the 'about' link, the pages will be loaded as it is (using jquery), but I want to change the URL string in the browser address bar also so that someone can actually copy or bookmark the exact page.

Is it possible to do so??

Oh. I think I got the same thing here. stackoverflow.com/questions/4371705/… — ptamzz
– ptamzz, Commented May 5, 2011 at 9:08
This should help you: stackoverflow.com/questions/5607902/… — Felix Kling
– Felix Kling, Commented May 5, 2011 at 9:08

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:47:43Z

You have two possibilites to tackle this problem:

In newer browsers you can make use of the HTML5 history API, which lets change part of the URL, also the query string (and path afaik).
In browsers which don't support this, you can only change the fragment identifier # without reloading the page (via the location object). That means you have to change the URL to e.g.
```
www.mydomain.com/#!page=about
```
#! is a convention from Google to make Ajax sites crawlable. As the fragment identifier is not sent to the server, you have to detect it with JavaScript and load the corresponding data from the server.
There are jQuery plugins that help you to handler this.

I would look for a good plugin makes use of the history API if available and falls back to the hash based solution.

As written in my comment, you can also find more information here:

How to change browser address bar without reloading page, especially @ThiefMaster's answer.

Atticus · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-05 09:09:31Z

-1

Yes, I've done it by doing

location.hash = 'foo';

There's other attributes of location you can change, not sure what it's called for '?', probably query-string, get, or soemthing like that.

answered May 5, 2011 at 9:09

Atticus

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3 Comments

Felix Kling Over a year ago

Changing the query string via the location object will reload the page.

JJJ Over a year ago

That will change whatever comes after a hash sign, e.g. you can change mydomain.com/page#foo to mydomain.com/page#bar, but that's not what the question was about.

Atticus Over a year ago

fine look at Felix's response: stackoverflow.com/questions/5607902/…

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