History: state property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The state read-only property of the History interface returns a value representing the state at the top of the history stack. This is a way to look at the state without having to wait for a popstate event.

Value

The state at the top of the history stack. The value is null until the pushState() or replaceState() method is used.

Examples

The code below logs the value of history.state before using the pushState() method to push a value to the history. The next line logs the value to the console again, showing that history.state now has a value.

js
// Should be null because we haven't modified the history stack yet
console.log("History.state before pushState: ", history.state);

// Now push something on the stack
history.pushState({ name: "Example" }, "pushState example", "page3.html");

// Now state has a value.
console.log("History.state after pushState: ", history.state);

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# dom-history-state-dev

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also