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javascriptparsingurlurl-parsing

Parse out a URL query argument in javascript

I'm using javascript and need to parse out a query argument that is a URL:

/folderone/two?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cooldomainname.com

This is doubly hard because I not only need to parse out the query argument "link", but once I have that, the "://" seems to have been turned into: "%3A%2F%2F"

I got so far as to do this: 

url.replace(/^.*\=/, '');

Which left me with:

http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cooldomainname.com

But now I still need to handle these "%3A%2F%2F" I could just do a find and replace, but I feel like there must be some type of library that I should be using to "de-URLify" query arguments?

Solution

  • Use:

    decodeURIComponent("http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cooldomainname.com");

    Output:

    "http://www.cooldomainname.com"

    Note also that I think split is a more natural choice than replace:

    "/folderone/two?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cooldomainname.com".split("=")[1]

    (It's assumed that your input string has just the one parameter.)