Accessing HREF Target from Servlet, using tomcat

Question

I have a question. I'm doing some oAuth stuff, and the remote site is redirecting me to:

my_url.html#something=blah&other_thing=blah-blah

I can see this is the url in the redirect of my browser bar.

What I can't figure out is how to access the part of the URL after the pound sign. I've tried getRequestURI(), getPathInfo(), getServletPath(), getPathTranslated(), and nothing is working. Also, the elements are (correctly) not showing up in the parameters collection.

How can I get that part of the URL from inside a servlet? I am using tomcat.

Comments

If I'm understanding things,  the browser is making the request for the page, and then looking for the
HREF target in the generated page. So, the reality is that tomcat never sees the part after the # sign. Rats.

Answer 1

Correct. I suppose there's nothing stopping a browser from sending you the "anchor" part of the URL, but it's not really supposed to be part of the resource identifier (the resource is the "page", not the particular place on the page where the user is scrolled-to) so it's pretty much never sent to the server.

Javascript, on the other hand, will likely have access to this information, so you could always make an AJAX request to the server to provide/get more information.