Parsing URL Variables With JavaScript



URL variables are variables that are passed in as part of the address(URL)of a page. Typically they are a series of name-value pairs that are separated by an ampersand and are delineated from the page's URL by a question mark.



Normally you grab these vars with a backend language like JSP or PHP and act on them there. There are times though when you either don't have access to a backend language or just need to handle these parameters via JavaScript. Here's how.


var searchString = document.location.search;

// strip off the leading '?'
searchString = searchString.substring(1);

var nvPairs = searchString.split("&");

for (i = 0; i < nvPairs.length; i++)
{
     var nvPair = nvPairs[i].split("=");
     var name = nvPair[0];
     var value = nvPair[1];
}

First we strip off the questionmark separating the URL of the page from its parameter list. Then we create an array of all the name-value pairs. Lastly, we loop through this array and extract each name and value. (You would insert conditional logic to handle these name-value pairs at that point).

11 comments :

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be this?

var name = nvPair[0];
var value = nvPair[1];

HUWebDev said...

Yep, you're right! Thanks for the bug catch!

Anonymous said...

This function works great! I have created (using your code) a function that retrieves the value of a passed in parm name. Every thing works well except I also need to strip out any URL special character replacements (spaces, *, etc.). Do you have any suggestions for this?

Thanks

Darkmavis said...

It works fine! I translate the article in italian in my tech blog

Anonymous said...

Rahul says:
Great!!It worked.I had to retrive Values from URL and desired values were in my JS.

Anonymous said...

how to parse URLs in JS you can find here

moonpixel said...

Very good, simple & effective, used this on my site, saved me some time...
thanks

Jeremy said...

Great, I was wondering how to do that. To put the name-value pairs into a global namespace, you can do:

(before the function declaration)
window.urlVars = new Object();

(and then within the loop)
window.urlVars[name] = value;

Anonymous said...

You can build your own javascript library that does this at http://jpaq.org/. For instance, if you are trying to get the "name" paramater, you can access it via the jPaq.GET["name"] variable. When you download this build, you also get two other useful URI functions.

Stephan Beal said...

Here's some code which can be run at page startup which will create a map of the URL args. It does not handle same-named args with an array suffix ("[]") like PHP does, but could easily be expanded to do so...


var MyApp = {
urlArgs:{}
};

MyApp.processUrlArgs = function() {
this.urlArgs = {};
var str = window.location.search ? window.location.search.substring(1) : false;
if( ! str ) return;
var sp = str.split(/&+/);
var rx = /^([^=]+)(=(.+))?/;
var k, v, i, m;
for( i in sp ) {
m = rx.exec( sp[i] );
if( ! m ) continue;
this.urlArgs[decodeURIComponent(m[1])] = decodeURIComponent(m[3]);
}
};

yanmaneee said...

hermes belt
nike react
yeezy shoes
yeezy 500
air max 2017
moncler
supreme
golden goose
yeezy boost 350 v2
cheap jordans