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.

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

js
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.

js
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

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobileserver
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Deno
Node.js
search

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support
See implementation notes.

See also

  • The URL interface it belongs to.