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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

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

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https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorElement/search