How can I simulate a click to an anchor tag?

Here is a complete test case that simulates the click event, calls all handlers attached (however they have been attached), maintains the "target" attribute ("srcElement" in IE), bubbles like a normal event would, and emulates IE's recursion-prevention. Tested in FF 2, Chrome 2.0, Opera 9.10 and of course IE (6):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<script>
function fakeClick(event, anchorObj) {
  if (anchorObj.click) {
    anchorObj.click()
  } else if(document.createEvent) {
    if(event.target !== anchorObj) {
      var evt = document.createEvent("MouseEvents"); 
      evt.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 
          0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null); 
      var allowDefault = anchorObj.dispatchEvent(evt);
      // you can check allowDefault for false to see if
      // any handler called evt.preventDefault().
      // Firefox will *not* redirect to anchorObj.href
      // for you. However every other browser will.
    }
  }
}
</script>
</head>
<body>

<div onclick="alert('Container clicked')">
  <a id="link" href="#" onclick="alert((event.target || event.srcElement).innerHTML)">Normal link</a>
</div>

<button type="button" onclick="fakeClick(event, document.getElementById('link'))">
  Fake Click on Normal Link
</button>

<br /><br />

<div onclick="alert('Container clicked')">
    <div onclick="fakeClick(event, this.getElementsByTagName('a')[0])"><a id="link2" href="#" onclick="alert('foo')">Embedded Link</a></div>
</div>

<button type="button" onclick="fakeClick(event, document.getElementById('link2'))">Fake Click on Embedded Link</button>

</body>
</html>

Demo here.

It avoids recursion in non-IE browsers by inspecting the event object that is initiating the simulated click, by inspecting the target attribute of the event (which remains unchanged during propagation).

Obviously IE does this internally holding a reference to its global event object. DOM level 2 defines no such global variable, so for that reason the simulator must pass in its local copy of event.

Quoted from https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/element.click

The click method is intended to be used with INPUT elements of type button, checkbox, radio, reset or submit. Gecko does not implement the click method on other elements that might be expected to respond to mouse–clicks such as links (A elements), nor will it necessarily fire the click event of other elements.

Non–Gecko DOMs may behave differently.

Unfortunately it sounds like you have already discovered the best solution to your problem.

As a side note, I agree that your solution seems less than ideal, but if you encapsulate the functionality inside a method (much like JQuery would do) it is not so bad.

How can I simulate a click to an anchor tag?

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