Adding a parameter to the URL with JavaScript

Question

In a web application that makes use of AJAX calls, I need to submit a request but add a parameter to the end of the URL, for example:

Original URL:

Answer 1

If you're messing around with urls in links or somewhere else, you may have to take the hash into account as well. Here's a fairly simple to understand solution. Probably not the FASTEST since it uses a regex... but in 99.999% of cases, the difference really doesn't matter!

function addQueryParam( url, key, val ){
    var parts = url.match(/([^?#]+)(\?[^#]*)?(\#.*)?/);
    var url = parts[1];
    var qs = parts[2] || '';
    var hash = parts[3] || '';

    if ( !qs ) {
        return url + '?' + key + '=' + encodeURIComponent( val ) + hash;
    } else {
        var qs_parts = qs.substr(1).split("&");
        var i;
        for (i=0;i<qs_parts.length;i++) {
            var qs_pair = qs_parts[i].split("=");
            if ( qs_pair[0] == key ){
                qs_parts[ i ] = key + '=' + encodeURIComponent( val );
                break;
            }
        }
        if ( i == qs_parts.length ){
            qs_parts.push( key + '=' + encodeURIComponent( val ) );
        }
        return url + '?' + qs_parts.join('&') + hash;
    }
}

Answer 2

This is a simple way to add a query parameter:

const query = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
query.append("enabled", "true");

And that is it more here.

Please note the support specs.

Answer 3

This will work in all modern browsers.

function insertParam(key,value) {
      if (history.pushState) {
          var newurl = window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.host + window.location.pathname + '?' +key+'='+value;
          window.history.pushState({path:newurl},'',newurl);
      }
    }

Answer 4

A basic implementation which you'll need to adapt would look something like this:

function insertParam(key, value) {
    key = encodeURIComponent(key);
    value = encodeURIComponent(value);

    // kvp looks like ['key1=value1', 'key2=value2', ...]
    var kvp = document.location.search.substr(1).split('&');
    let i=0;

    for(; i<kvp.length; i++){
        if (kvp[i].startsWith(key + '=')) {
            let pair = kvp[i].split('=');
            pair[1] = value;
            kvp[i] = pair.join('=');
            break;
        }
    }

    if(i >= kvp.length){
        kvp[kvp.length] = [key,value].join('=');
    }

    // can return this or...
    let params = kvp.join('&');

    // reload page with new params
    document.location.search = params;
}

This is approximately twice as fast as a regex or search based solution, but that depends completely on the length of the querystring and the index of any match

---

the slow regex method I benchmarked against for completions sake (approx +150% slower)

function insertParam2(key,value)
{
    key = encodeURIComponent(key); value = encodeURIComponent(value);

    var s = document.location.search;
    var kvp = key+"="+value;

    var r = new RegExp("(&|\\?)"+key+"=[^\&]*");

    s = s.replace(r,"$1"+kvp);

    if(!RegExp.$1) {s += (s.length>0 ? '&' : '?') + kvp;};

    //again, do what you will here
    document.location.search = s;
}

Answer 5

const urlParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);

urlParams.set('order', 'date');

window.location.search = urlParams;

.set first agrument is the key, the second one is the value.

Answer 6

As best I can tell none of the above answers address the case where the query string contains parameters which are themselves an array and hence will appear more than once, e.g:

http://example.com?sizes[]=a&sizes[]=b

The following function is what I wrote to update document.location.search. It takes an array of key/value pair arrays as an argument and it will return a revised version of the latter which you can do whatever you'd like with. I'm using it like this:

var newParams = [
    ['test','123'],
    ['best','456'],
    ['sizes[]','XXL']
];
var newUrl = document.location.pathname + insertParams(newParams);
history.replaceState('', '', newUrl);

If the current url was:

http://example.com/index.php?test=replaceme&sizes[]=XL

This would get you

http://example.com/index.php?test=123&sizes[]=XL&sizes[]=XXL&best=456

Function

function insertParams(params) {
    var result;
    var ii = params.length;
    var queryString = document.location.search.substr(1);
    var kvps = queryString ? queryString.split('&') : [];
    var kvp;
    var skipParams = [];
    var i = kvps.length;
    while (i--) {
        kvp = kvps[i].split('=');
        if (kvp[0].slice(-2) != '[]') {
            var ii = params.length;
            while (ii--) {
                if (params[ii][0] == kvp[0]) {
                    kvp[1] = params[ii][1];
                    kvps[i] = kvp.join('=');
                    skipParams.push(ii);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    var ii = params.length;
    while (ii--) {
        if (skipParams.indexOf(ii) === -1) {
            kvps.push(params[ii].join('='));
        }
    }
    result = kvps.length ? '?' + kvps.join('&') : '';
    return result;
}