HTMLAnchorElement: search property

The search property of the HTMLAnchorElement interface is a search string, also called a query string, that is a string containing a "?" followed by the parameters of the <a> element's href. 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 query string.

See URL.search for more information.

Value

A string.

Examples

Getting the search string from an anchor link

// 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:

let params = new URLSearchParams(queryString);
let q = parseInt(params.get("q"), 10); // returns the number 123

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• The HTMLAnchorElement interface it belongs to.