Location: search property

The search property of the Location interface is a search string, also called a query string, that is a string containing a "?" followed by the parameters of the location's URL. If the URL does not have a search query, this property contains an empty string, "".

This property can be set to change the query string of the URL. When setting, a single "?" prefix is added to the provided value, if not already present. Setting it to "" removes the query string.

The query is percent-encoded when setting but not percent-decoded when reading.

Modern browsers provide URLSearchParams and URL.searchParams to make it easy to parse out the parameters from the querystring.

See URL.search for more information.

Value

A string.

Examples

js
// Let an <a id="myAnchor" href="/en-US/docs/Location.search?q=123"> element be in the document
const anchor = document.getElementById("myAnchor");
const queryString = anchor.search; // Returns:'?q=123'

// Further parsing:
const params = new URLSearchParams(queryString);
const q = parseInt(params.get("q")); // is the number 123

Specifications

Browser compatibility