URL: search 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.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The search property of the URL interface is a search string, also called a query string, that is a string containing a "?" followed by the parameters of the URL. 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 the URL.searchParams property to make it easy to parse out the parameters from the query string.

Value

A string.

Examples

Basic usage

const url = new URL(
  "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL/search?q=123",
);
console.log(url.search); // Logs "?q=123"

Interaction with searchParams

The URL.searchParams property exposes the search string as a URLSearchParams object. When updating this URLSearchParams, the URL's search is updated with its serialization. However, URL.search encodes a subset of characters that URLSearchParams does, and encodes spaces as %20 instead of +. This may cause some surprising interactions—if you update searchParams, even with the same values, the URL may be serialized differently.

const url = new URL("https://example.com/?a=b ~");
console.log(url.href); // "https://example.com/?a=b%20~"
console.log(url.searchParams.toString()); // "a=b+%7E"
// This should be a no-op, but it changes the URL's query to the
// serialization of its searchParams
url.searchParams.sort();
console.log(url.href); // "https://example.com/?a=b+%7E"

const url2 = new URL("https://example.com?search=1234&param=my%20param");
console.log(url2.search); // "?search=1234&param=my%20param"
url2.searchParams.delete("search");
console.log(url2.search); // "?param=my+param"

Specifications

Specification
URL # dom-url-search

Browser compatibility

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