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 September 2016.

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. 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 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

desktop mobile server
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Bun
Deno
Node.js
search
Chrome – Full support
Chrome 32 (Release date: 2014-01-14)
footnote Full support
Edge – Full support
Edge 13 (Release date: 2015-11-12)
footnote Full support
Firefox – Full support
Firefox 22 (Release date: 2013-06-25)
footnote
footnote Before Firefox 53, pathname and search returned wrong values for custom protocols. Given protocol:host/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. See bug 1310483.
Opera – Full support
Opera 19 (Release date: 2014-01-28)
footnote Full support
Safari – Full support
Safari 10 (Release date: 2016-09-20)
footnote Full support
Chrome Android – Full support
Chrome Android 32 (Release date: 2014-01-15)
footnote Full support
Firefox for Android – Full support
Firefox for Android 22 (Release date: 2013-06-25)
footnote
footnote Before Firefox for Android 53, pathname and search returned wrong values for custom protocols. Given protocol:host/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. See bug 1310483.
Opera Android – Full support
Opera Android 19 (Release date: 2014-01-28)
footnote Full support
Safari on iOS – Full support
Safari on iOS 10 (Release date: 2016-09-13)
footnote Full support
Samsung Internet – Full support
Samsung Internet 2 (Release date: 2014-10-17)
footnote Full support
WebView Android – Full support
WebView Android 4.4.3 (Release date: 2014-06-02)
footnote Full support
WebView on iOS – Full support
WebView on iOS 10 (Release date: 2016-09-13)
footnote Full support
Bun – Full support
Bun 1 (Release date: 2023-09-08)
footnote Full support
Deno – Full support
Deno 1 (Release date: 2020-05-13)
footnote Full support
Node.js – Full support
Node.js 6.13 (Release date: 2018-02-13)
footnote Full support

Legend

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Full support
Full support
See implementation notes.

See also

  • The URL interface it belongs to.