How to get the value from the GET parameters?

Question

I have a URL with some GET parameters as follows:

www.test.com/t.html?a=1&b=3&c=m2-m3-m4-m5 

I need to get the whole value of c. I tried to read the URL, but I got only m2. How do I do this using JavaScript?

Answer 1

JavaScript itself has nothing built in for handling query string parameters.

Code running in a (modern) browser you can use the URL object (which is part of the APIs provided by browsers to JS):

var url_string = "http://www.example.com/t.html?a=1&b=3&c=m2-m3-m4-m5"; //window.location.href
var url = new URL(url_string);
var c = url.searchParams.get("c");
console.log(c);

---

For older browsers (including Internet Explorer), you can use this polyfill or the code from the original version of this answer that predates URL:

You could access location.search, which would give you from the ? character on to the end of the URL or the start of the fragment identifier (#foo), whichever comes first.

Then you can parse it with this:

function parse_query_string(query) {
  var vars = query.split("&");
  var query_string = {};
  for (var i = 0; i < vars.length; i++) {
    var pair = vars[i].split("=");
    var key = decodeURIComponent(pair[0]);
    var value = decodeURIComponent(pair[1]);
    // If first entry with this name
    if (typeof query_string[key] === "undefined") {
      query_string[key] = decodeURIComponent(value);
      // If second entry with this name
    } else if (typeof query_string[key] === "string") {
      var arr = [query_string[key], decodeURIComponent(value)];
      query_string[key] = arr;
      // If third or later entry with this name
    } else {
      query_string[key].push(decodeURIComponent(value));
    }
  }
  return query_string;
}

var query_string = "a=1&b=3&c=m2-m3-m4-m5";
var parsed_qs = parse_query_string(query_string);
console.log(parsed_qs.c);

You can get the query string from the URL of the current page with:

var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
var qs = parse_query_string(query);