I need to parse long urls and set a variable (category) equal to one of the /folders/ in the path.
For example, a url that is
http://example.
When you do this.href*= you're doing multiplication, and that's why you're getting not-a-number. It multiplies this.href by the string and assigns that to href.
If you mean to test whether the url starts with that string you can do it like this, no need for jQuery:
var start = 'http://example.com/community/';
if (url.substring(0, start.length) === start)){
var category = url.split("community/");
var lastPart = category[category.length - 1];
return lastPart.split("/")[0];
}