HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils.search

The HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils.search property is a search string, also called a query string, that is USVString containing a '?' followed by the parameters of the URL.

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

Syntax

string = object.search;
object.search = string;

Examples

// Let an <a id="myAnchor" href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils.search?q=123"> element be in the document
var anchor = document.getElementById("myAnchor");
var queryString = anchor.search; // Returns:'?q=123'
// Further parsing:
let params = new URLSearchParams(queryString.substring(1)); // substring(1) to drop the leading "?"
let q = parseInt(params.get("q")); // is the number 123

Specifications

Browser compatibility

[1] Starting in Chrome 52, this property was moved to URL

[2] Though not grouped in a single abstract interface, this method is directly available on the interfaces that implement it, if this interface is supported.

[3] From Gecko 22 to Gecko 44, this property was on the URLUtils mixin. It has been moved either on the HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils mixin, or directly on the interface.

[4] Before Firefox 53, the pathname and search HTMLHyperLinkElementUtils properties returned the wrong parts of the URL. For example, for a URL of http://z.com/x?a=true&b=false, pathname would return "/x?a=true&b=false" and search would return "", rather than "/x" and "?a=true&b=false" respectively. This has now been fixed.

See also

• The HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils mixin it belongs to.