W3cubDocs

/Web APIs

HTMLAnchorElement: search property

The HTMLAnchorElement.search property is a search string, also called a query string, that is a string 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.

Value

A string.

Examples

js

// An <a id="myAnchor" href="/en-US/docs/HTMLAnchorElement?q=123"> element is in the document
const anchor = document.getElementById("myAnchor");
anchor.search; // returns '?q=123'

Advanced parsing using URLSearchParams

Alternatively, URLSearchParams can be used:

js

let params = new URLSearchParams(queryString);
let q = parseInt(params.get("q")); // returns the number 123

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# dom-hyperlink-search-dev

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
search 1 12
1Before 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.
 5.5 15 1 4.4 18
4Before 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.
 14 1 1.0

See also

© 2005–2023 MDN contributors.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorElement/search