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 (HTML) # dom-hyperlink-search-dev

Browser compatibility

	Desktop						Mobile
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari	WebView Android	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on IOS	Samsung Internet
`search`	1	12	1 Before Firefox 53, the `pathname` and `search` `HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils` properties returned the wrong parts of the URL. For example, for a URL of `http://z.com/x?a=true&b=false`, `pathname` would return `'/x?a=true&b=false'` and `search` would return '', rather than `'/x'` and `'?a=true&b=false'` respectively. This has now been fixed.	5	15	1	1	18	4 Before Firefox 53, the `pathname` and `search` `HTMLHyperlinkElementUtils` properties returned the wrong parts of the URL. For example, for a URL of `http://z.com/x?a=true&b=false`, `pathname` would return `'/x?a=true&b=false'` and `search` would return '', rather than `'/x'` and `'?a=true&b=false'` respectively. This has now been fixed.	14	1	1.0