HTMLAnchorElement.search

The HTMLAnchorElement.search property is a search string, also called a query string, that is USVString 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.

Syntax

// Getter
string = anchor.search;
// Setter
anchor.search = 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")); // returns the number 123

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # dom-hyperlink-search-dev

Browser compatibility

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