Anyone know of a good way to write a jQuery extension to handle query string parameters? I basically want to extend the jQuery magic ($) function so I can do something like this:

$('?search').val(); 

Which would give me the value "test" in the following URL: http://www.example.com/index.php?search=test.

I've seen a lot of functions that can do this in jQuery and Javascript, but I actually want to extend jQuery to work exactly as it is shown above. I'm not looking for a jQuery plugin, I'm looking for an extension to the jQuery method.

After years of ugly string parsing, there's a better way: URLSearchParams Let's have a look at how we can use this new API to get values from the location!

//Assuming URL has "?post=1234&action=edit"

var urlParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
console.log(urlParams.has('post')); // true
console.log(urlParams.get('action')); // "edit"
console.log(urlParams.getAll('action')); // ["edit"]
console.log(urlParams.toString()); // "?post=1234&action=edit"
console.log(urlParams.append('active', '1')); // "?

post=1234&action=edit&active=1"

UPDATE (03/21/24) : All Major Browsers Now Supported

URLSearchParams is now supported by all major browsers

UPDATE : IE is not supported

use this function from an answer below instead of URLSearchParams

$.urlParam = function (name) {
    var results = new RegExp('[\?&]' + name + '=([^&#]*)')
                      .exec(window.location.search);

    return (results !== null) ? results[1] || 0 : false;
}

console.log($.urlParam('action')); //edit