Trailing hash (#) in URL breaks some Javascript?

Question

I ran into a real head scratcher recently while trying to debug an issue with our Magento store. Some of the in-line javascript in one of the template files wasn't running and I couldn't figure out why. It ran fine in another instance of the page viewing a different product but not when viewing the one I was having trouble with. Somehow, in the course of my debugging, a hash symbol (#) got added to the end of the URL. For some reason, this was causing the Javascript to not run. I removed the hash and everything works as expected. I know that hashes in URLs are used for linking to anchor points and you can do other fancy things with hashes as well that I'm not familiar with but ran across in my searching for a solution. Can anyone explain what's going on here and why a trailing slash breaks some of my javascript? Also, would you recommend I take steps to clean up the URL (perhaps with htaccess rules) so that a customer doesn't accidentally run into this problem and curse us for having a broken website?

Thanks!

Answer 1

it is most likely the js you use parses the URL and try to match the end part (query or whatnot) to a specific string. once the # got added the string no longer matches and so it does not work.

of course, it could be other things but without seeing sample code that was my first thought