Accessing query string variables with Javascript

Hi,

I might be losing the plot here but can I get at the query string values in the address bar of the browser with Javascript client-side?

Thanks for any help

At first I thought the answer would be no, but then I had a thought and realised that you can. Not in the same way but it's possible. What you do is:

if you had a URL such as http://www.here.com/here.html?a=5&b=6

all you have to do is do a bit of javascript such as:

var urlString = unescape(window.location)

that gives you the url, then:

var a = urlString.substr(urlString.indexOf("a="), urlString.length)

and work from there!

Also there is a location object that will return only the query string part (everything after .com/net etc including the ?) of the URL.

location.search

so using the same URL example: http://www.here.com/here.html?a=5&b=6

you would do something like:

var query = location.search;

var aValue = query.substring(query.indexOf("a=") + 2, query.indexOf("&"));

var bValue = query.substring(query.indexOf("b=") + 2, query.length);

This thread is an oldie!
Anyway, I'm trying to do something like this, and this script is close.

The only problem is that I don't know how long the value of a variable will be, so how do you leave out the specific query length?

This thread is an oldie!!! I developed the following method for retrieving parameter values from the query string. But, you must know the parameter name in order to retrieve the value... Now, knowing the parameter name would leave me to believe that you would know the length, so this may not be appropriate for you, but here it is anyhow:


q = location.search;

getParam = function(arg) {
if (q.indexOf(arg) >= 0) {
var pntr = q.indexOf(arg) + arg.length + 1;
if (q.indexOf("&", pntr) >= 0) {
return q.substring(pntr, q.indexOf("&", pntr));
} else {
return q.substring(pntr, q.length);
}
} else {
return null;
}
}

So you'd end up with something like:

?foo=someValue

var val = getParam("foo");

and val would equal "someValue"

If you do not know the parameter names you may want to develop a function that parses the query string and returns a multi-dimensional of name / value pairs