History: pushState() method
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
The pushState()
method of the History
interface adds an entry to the browser's
session history stack.
Syntax
pushState(state, unused)
pushState(state, unused, url)
Parameters
state
-
The
state
object is a JavaScript object which is associated with the new history entry created bypushState()
. Whenever the user navigates to the newstate
, apopstate
event is fired, and thestate
property of the event contains a copy of the history entry'sstate
object.The
state
object can be anything that can be serialized.Note: Some browsers save
state
objects to the user's disk so they can be restored after the user restarts the browser, and impose a size limit on the serialized representation of astate
object, and will throw an exception if you pass astate
object whose serialized representation is larger than that size limit. So in cases where you want to ensure you have more space than what some browsers might impose, you're encouraged to usesessionStorage
and/orlocalStorage
. unused
-
This parameter exists for historical reasons, and cannot be omitted; passing an empty string is safe against future changes to the method.
url
Optional-
The new history entry's URL. Note that the browser won't attempt to load this URL after a call to
pushState()
, but it may attempt to load the URL later, for instance, after the user restarts the browser. The new URL does not need to be absolute; if it's relative, it's resolved relative to the current URL. The new URL must be of the same origin as the current URL; otherwise,pushState()
will throw an exception. If this parameter isn't specified, it's set to the document's current URL.
Return value
None (undefined
).
Exceptions
SecurityError
DOMException
-
Thrown if the associated document is not fully active, or if the provided
url
parameter is not a valid URL. Browsers also throttle navigations and may throw this error, generate a warning, or ignore the call if it's called too frequently. DataCloneError
DOMException
-
Thrown if the provided
state
parameter is not serializable.
Description
In a sense, calling pushState()
is similar to
setting window.location = "#foo"
, in that both will also create and
activate another history entry associated with the current document.
But pushState()
has a few advantages:
- The new URL can be any URL in the same origin as the current URL. In contrast,
setting
window.location
keeps you at the same document only if you modify only the hash. - Changing the page's URL is optional. In contrast,
setting
window.location = "#foo";
only creates a new history entry if the current hash isn't#foo
. - You can associate arbitrary data with your new history entry. With the hash-based approach, you need to encode all of the relevant data into a short string.
Note that pushState()
never causes a hashchange
event to be
fired, even if the new URL differs from the old URL only in its hash.
Examples
This creates a new browser history entry setting the state and url.
JavaScript
const state = { page_id: 1, user_id: 5 };
const url = "hello-world.html";
history.pushState(state, "", url);
Change a query parameter
const url = new URL(location);
url.searchParams.set("foo", "bar");
history.pushState({}, "", url);
Specifications
Specification |
---|
HTML Standard # dom-history-pushstate-dev |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser