find the <a> tag by text of the href

Question

I want to use jQuery to find a link and hide it . I want to search for the text of the link using jQuery. This doesn't work:

<a href="example.com/foo-bar">a website link</a>

function replace_text() {
  var linkText = jQuery('a').text();
  var answer = linkText.replace('a website link', '');
}
replace_text();

Answer 1

To hide the element by it's text you could use the :contains selector, then hide(), like this:

$('a:contains("a website link")').hide();

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<a href="example.com/foo-bar">a website link</a>

Note that the above is a case-insensitive greedy match. If you want an exact match you can use filter(), like this:

$('a').filter(function() {
  return $(this).text().trim() == 'a website link';
}).hide();

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<a href="example.com/foo-bar">a website link</a>