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

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also