In this post, I would like to share a little jQuery code snippet that makes getting URL parameters and their values more convenient.

Recently, while working on one of my projects, I needed to read and get parameter values from URL string of the current page that was constructed and sent by PHP script. I came across this short and sweet JavaScript code snippet by Roshambo that does just that.

// Read a page's GET URL variables and return them as an associative array. function getUrlVars() { var vars = [], hash; var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&'); for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++) { hash = hashes[i].split('='); vars.push(hash[0]); vars[hash[0]] = hash[1]; } return vars; }

The function returns an array/object with your URL parameters and their values. For example, consider we have the following URL:

http://www.example.com/?me=myValue&name2=SomeOtherValue

Calling getUrlVars() function would return you the following array:

{ "me" : "myValue", "name2" : "SomeOtherValue" }

To get a value of first parameter you would do this:

var first = getUrlVars()["me"]; // To get the second parameter var second = getUrlVars()["name2"];

To make the script syntax to look more jQuery like syntax I rewrote it as an extension for jQuery:

$.extend({ getUrlVars: function(){ var vars = [], hash; var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&'); for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++) { hash = hashes[i].split('='); vars.push(hash[0]); vars[hash[0]] = hash[1]; } return vars; }, getUrlVar: function(name){ return $.getUrlVars()[name]; } });

Now, if you include the above code in your javascript file, you can get URL parameter values in the following way:

// Get object of URL parameters var allVars = $.getUrlVars(); // Getting URL var by its nam var byName = $.getUrlVar('name');

That’s it! You might also find the following jQuery related articles on this blogs interesting: