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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T10:29:15+00:00

I have a very simple form on my site http://www.example.com <form> <input type=text value=

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I have a very simple form on my site http://www.example.com

<form>
    <input type="text" value="" name="name">
</form>

How do I get my form to look like this

<form>
    <input type="text" value="tom" name="name">
</form>

If I type in (or a user is taken to this page from a search page) http://www.example.com?name=tom

bearing in mind at some point my form may look like this.

<form>
    <input type="text" value="" name="name[]">
    <input type="text" value="" name="name[]">
    <input type="text" value="" name="name[]">
    <input type="text" value="" name="name[]">
</form>

so I would like to handle an array of names as well. I have had a look at jQuery.param() but can’t get my head around how I would do this. Is it possible without submitting to a server side language sucha as php?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s no baked-in jQuery way to get name/value pairs from the querysting to javascript variables (though, shouldn’t there be??)

    But folks have written pure javascript functions to do that for you: How can I get query string values in JavaScript?.

    If you use the 2nd answer to the above question, by Andy E, you can capture all the querystring vars to name-value pairs of a javascript object. Here’s what he wrote:

    var urlParams = {};
(function () {
    var match,
        pl     = /\+/g,  // Regex for replacing addition symbol with a space
        search = /([^&=]+)=?([^&]*)/g,
        decode = function (s) { return decodeURIComponent(s.replace(pl, " ")); },
        query  = window.location.search.substring(1);

    while (match = search.exec(query))
       urlParams[decode(match[1])] = decode(match[2]);
})();

    Then use these to set the form values of inputs with the same name as the querystring names with jQuery like this:

    $.each(urlParams, function(key, value){
    $('form [name=' + key + ']').val(value);
});

    Update: since this is hard to test in jsFiddle, here is an entire web page as a working example. It will replace the values ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ with those passed in by the url (‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘3’) — just set this up as test.html on localhost and go to: http://localhost/test.html?a=1&b=2&c=3

    <!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head><title>Test URL params</title>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" >
    $(function(){
            var urlParams = {};
            (function () {
                var match,
                pl     = /\+/g,  // Regex for replacing addition symbol with a space
                search = /([^&=]+)=?([^&]*)/g,
                decode = function (s) { return decodeURIComponent(s.replace(pl, " ")); },
                query  = window.location.search.substring(1);

                while (match = search.exec(query))
                   urlParams[decode(match[1])] = decode(match[2]);
            })();

            $.each(urlParams, function(key, value){
                $('form [name=' + key + ']').val(value);
            });
    });
</script>

</head>
<body>

<form>
    <input name="a" value ="a" /><input name="b" value ="a" /><input name="c" value ="a" />
</form>

</body></html>
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