HTMLAreaElement: 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.

The search property of the HTMLAreaElement interface is a search string, also called a query string, that is a string containing a "?" followed by the parameters of the <area> element's href. 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 URLSearchParams and URL.searchParams to make it easy to parse out the parameters from the query string.

See URL.search for more information.

Value

A string.

Examples

js
// An <area id="myArea" href="/en-US/docs/HTMLAreaElement?q=123"> element is in the document
const area = document.getElementById("myArea");
area.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
# dom-hyperlink-search-dev

Browser compatibility

See also