How can i event.preventDefault() when using jQuery's mousedown and mouseup methods?

Question

I am using event.preventDefault() to prevent concatenation of # which is the href of an anchor to the URL. I am preforming events on the mousedown() and mouseup() parts of the click which is why i cant use click. But event.preventDefault() is not preventing the concatenation of # to the URL when envoking mouseup() or mousedown() methods. How can i get around this?

Answer 1

If you're talking about clicking a link, it is probably because there isn't a default behavior to prevent for mousedown and mouseup.

The default behavior of clicking a link requires a combination of mousedown plus mouseup on the link. If you mousedown then drag off the link before you mouseup, the link is not followed. The same vice-versa.

Only when you mousedown then mouseup is the default behavior activated. That event is represented by the click event.

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EDIT: I guess I forgot to answer the question.

How do you get around it? Add a click() event handler that does e.preventDefault().

$('a.myElement').click(function(e){e.preventDefault()});

If you also want to stop propagation of the event, and if you're using jQuery 1.4.3 or later, you can do this:

$('a.myElement').bind('click',false);

From the docs for the bind()^(docs) method:

Setting the third argument to false will attach a function that prevents the default action from occurring and stops the event from bubbling.

Again, it requires jQuery 1.4.3 or later.