Ideally you output this class from the server side, but if you can’t… Let’s say you have navigation like this:
<nav> <ul> <li><a href="/">Home</a></li> <li><a href="/about/">About</a></li> <li><a href="/clients/">Clients</a></li> <li><a href="/contact/">Contact Us</a></li> </ul> </nav>
And you are at the URL: http://yoursite.com/about/team/ And you want the About link to get a class of “active” so you can visually indicate it’s the active navigation.
$(function() { $('nav a[href^="/' + location.pathname.split("/")[1] + '"]').addClass('active'); });
Essentially that will match links in the nav who’s href attribute begins with “/about” (or whatever the secondary directory happens to be).