How to get the current URL in JavaScript

Oct 1, 2018

Learn how to get the current URL in JavaScript with window.location and location.href, plus handy properties like pathname, hostname, hash, and search.

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To get the current URL of the page you opened in the browser using JavaScript you can rely on the location property exposed by the browser on the window object:

window.location

Since window is the global object in the browser, the property can be referenced as

location

This is a Location object which has many properties on its own:

window.location

The current page URL is exposed in

location.href

Other properties of location provide useful information:

Code	Description
`location.hostname`	the host name
`location.origin`	the origin
`location.hash`	the hash, the part that follow the hash # symbol
`location.pathname`	the path
`location.port`	the port
`location.protocol`	the protocol
`location.search`	the query string

If you’re not sure which property maps to which part of a URL, I built a free URL parser tool that labels every part of any URL you paste in.

Tagged: JavaScript · All topics

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