How to enable or disable an anchor using jQuery?

Question

To prevent an anchor from following the specified href, I would suggest using preventDefault():

// jQuery 1.7+
$(function () {
    $('a.something').on("click", function (e) {
        e.preventDefault();
    });
});

// jQuery < 1.7
$(function () {
    $('a.something').click(function (e) {
        e.preventDefault();
    });

    // or 

    $('a.something').bind("click", function (e) {
        e.preventDefault();
    });
});

See:

http://docs.jquery.com/Events/jQuery.Event#event.preventDefault.28.29

Also see this previous question on SO:

jQuery disable a link

The app I'm currently working on does it with a CSS style in combination with javascript.

a.disabled { color:gray; }

Then whenever I want to disable a link I call

$('thelink').addClass('disabled');

Then, in the click handler for 'thelink' a tag I always run a check first thing

if ($('thelink').hasClass('disabled')) return;

I found an answer that I like much better here

Looks like this:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("a").click(function () { 
        $(this).fadeTo("fast", .5).removeAttr("href"); 
    });
});

Enabling would involve setting the href attribute

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("a").click(function () { 
        $(this).fadeIn("fast").attr("href", "http://whatever.com/wherever.html"); 
    });
});

This gives you the appearance that the anchor element becomes normal text, and vice versa.

$("a").click(function(){
                alert('disabled');
                return false;

}); 

I think a nicer solution is to set disabled data attribute on and anchor an check for it on click. This way we can disable temporarily an anchor until e.g. the javascript is finished with ajax call or some calculations. If we do not disable it, then we can quickly click it a few times, which is undesirable...

$('a').live('click', function () {
    var anchor = $(this);

    if (anchor.data("disabled")) {
        return false;
    }

    anchor.data("disabled", "disabled");

    $.ajax({
        url: url,
        data: data,
        cache: false,
        success: function (json) {
            // when it's done, we enable the anchor again
            anchor.removeData("disabled");
        },
        error: function () {
             // there was an error, enable the anchor
            anchor.removeData("disabled");
        }
    });

    return false;
});

I made a jsfiddle example: http://jsfiddle.net/wgZ59/76/