Kevin Powell - Community•9mo ago

How to get a string within a string (JS)

Let's say for example, I have the following string in a URL /?search_query=new%shoes&filter=shirts&color=red or /?filter=jackets&search_query=new%shoes&color=orange or any other combination. What's the best approach at pulling only the search_query value from the string? search_query=new%shoes would result in 'New Shoes'. I need to do this dynamically to account for any size string and any order. I was thinking of using substring and trying to find the nearest index of say = and & or & and (nothing), if there is a case where URL is just /?search_query=new%shoes

7 Replies

MattOP•9mo ago

I might be explaining this horribly, but the goal is to create a search bar that works with filtering functions for a catalog. Right now I'm trying to pull the user's query in order to display as the input's placeholder after they search

theoriginalandrew•9mo ago

you're query is wrong - it should be new%20shoes which would yield new shoes. If you need it capitalized you could handle that in the URL or you could do that with CSS text-transform: capitalize; Next, you can get the URL params from window.location.search and assign that to a variable: const queryString = window.location.search From there, you can do like const urlParams = new URLSearchParams(queryString) From there you can do like urlParams.get("search_query") which would return new shoes Here's more docs on URLSearchParams https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URLSearchParams/get

MDN Web Docs

URLSearchParams: get() method - Web APIs | MDN

The get() method of the URLSearchParams interface returns the first value associated to the given search parameter.

MattOP•9mo ago

Thank you, I was oblivious to this approach I actually just finishing making a solution doing nothing close to this. I'm still new to JS but this is what I came up with 😅

let currentUrl = window.location.href;

function getQuery(currentUrl) {

    let endIndex, searchValue;

    let startIndex = currentUrl.indexOf("search_query=");
    if (startIndex !== -1) {
        startIndex += "search_query=".length;
        
        if (currentUrl.includes('&')) {
            endIndex = currentUrl.indexOf("&", startIndex);
        } else {
            endIndex = currentUrl.lastIndexOf(currentUrl.length);
        }

        searchValue = currentUrl.substring(startIndex, endIndex !== -1 ? endIndex : undefined);

        if(searchValue.includes('%20')) {
            searchValue = searchValue.replace('%20', ' ')
        }

        return searchValue;
    }
    return null;
}

// Extract the search value
let searchValue = getQuery(currentUrl);

if (searchValue !== null) {
    searchBar.placeholder = searchValue
}

let currentUrl = window.location.href;

function getQuery(currentUrl) {

    let endIndex, searchValue;

    let startIndex = currentUrl.indexOf("search_query=");
    if (startIndex !== -1) {
        startIndex += "search_query=".length;
        
        if (currentUrl.includes('&')) {
            endIndex = currentUrl.indexOf("&", startIndex);
        } else {
            endIndex = currentUrl.lastIndexOf(currentUrl.length);
        }

        searchValue = currentUrl.substring(startIndex, endIndex !== -1 ? endIndex : undefined);

        if(searchValue.includes('%20')) {
            searchValue = searchValue.replace('%20', ' ')
        }

        return searchValue;
    }
    return null;
}

// Extract the search value
let searchValue = getQuery(currentUrl);

if (searchValue !== null) {
    searchBar.placeholder = searchValue
}

theoriginalandrew•9mo ago

That kinda would work unless you have other special characters like an apostrophe which would be %27, so then it would still show up like Matt%27s New Shoes

MattOP•9mo ago

I was thinking of adding a condition to check for those 1 off characters separately

theoriginalandrew•9mo ago

URLSearchParams would do all of it for you - and you could actually turn the params into an easy to use object too something as simple as

const params = Object.fromEntries(new URLSearchParams(window.location.search));

const params = Object.fromEntries(new URLSearchParams(window.location.search));

the only thing i'd change in your url is to go from search_query to one word either search or query or even q which is pretty common

MattOP•9mo ago

That's awesome wow. Thank you very much This has been a complete head ache lol

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How to get a string within a string (JS)