How can I remove the location hash without causing the page to scroll?

I believe if you just put in a dummy hash it won't scroll as there is no match to scroll to.

<a href="#A4J2S9F7">No jumping</a>

or

<a href="#_">No jumping</a>

"#" by itself is equivalent to "_top" thus causes a scroll to the top of the page

I use the following on a few sites, NO PAGE JUMPS!

Nice clean address bar for HTML5 friendly browsers, and just a # for older browsers.

$('#logo a').click(function(e){    window.location.hash = ''; // for older browsers, leaves a # behind    history.pushState('', document.title, window.location.pathname); // nice and clean    e.preventDefault(); // no page reload});

window.location's hash property is stupid in a couple of ways. This is one of them; the other is that is has different get and set values:

window.location.hash = "hello";  // url now reads *.com#helloalert(window.location.hash);   // shows "#hello", which is NOT what I set.window.location.hash = window.location.hash; // url now reads *.com##hello

Note that setting the hash property to '' removes the hash mark too; that's what redirects the page. To set the value of the hash part of the url to '', leaving the hash mark and therefore not refreshing, write this:

window.location.href = window.location.href.replace(/#.*$/, '#');

There is no way to completely remove the hash mark once set without refreshing the page.

UPDATE 2012:

As Blazemonger and thinkdj have pointed out, technology has improved. Some browsers do allow you to clear that hashtag, but some do not. To support both, try something like:

if ( window.history && window.history.pushState ) {     window.history.pushState('', '', window.location.pathname) } else {     window.location.href = window.location.href.replace(/#.*$/, '#'); }