<p>How can you change the <code>href</code> attribute (link target) for a hyperlink using jQuery?</p>

Using
```
```
$("a").attr("href", "http://www.google.com/")
```
```
will modify the href of all hyperlinks to point to Google. You probably want a somewhat more refined selector though. For instance, if you have a mix of link source (hyperlink) and link target (a.k.a. "anchor") anchor tags:
```
```
<a name="MyLinks"></a>
<a href="http://www.codeproject.com/">The CodeProject</a>
```
```
...Then you probably don't want to accidentally add
```
href
```
attributes to them. For safety then, we can specify that our selector will only match
```
<a>
```
tags with an existing
```
href
```
attribute:
```
```
$("a[href]") //...
```
```
Of course, you'll probably have something more interesting in mind. If you want to match an anchor with a specific existing
```
href
```
, you might use something like this:
```
```
$("a[href='http://www.google.com/']").attr('href', 'http://www.live.com/')
```
```
This will find links where the
```
href
```
exactly matches the string
```
http://www.google.com/
```
. A more involved task might be matching, then updating only part of the
```
href
```
:
```
```
$("a[href^='http://stackoverflow.com']")
   .each(function()
   { 
      this.href = this.href.replace(/^http:\/\/beta\.stackoverflow\.com/, 
         "http://stackoverflow.com");
   });
```
```
The first part selects only links where the href
starts
with
```
http://stackoverflow.com
```
. Then, a function is defined that uses a simple regular expression to replace this part of the URL with a new one. Note the flexibility this gives you - any sort of modification to the link could be done here.