Get current URL with jQuery?

Question

I am using jQuery. How do I get the path of the current URL and assign it to a variable?

Example URL:

http://localhost/menuname.de?foo=bar&nu         


        

Answer 1

This is a more complicated issue than many may think. Several browsers support built-in JavaScript location objects and associated parameters/methods accessible through window.location or document.location. However, different flavors of Internet Explorer (6,7) don't support these methods in the same way, (window.location.href? window.location.replace() not supported) so you have to access them differently by writing conditional code all the time to hand-hold Internet Explorer.

So, if you have jQuery available and loaded, you might as well use jQuery (location), as the others mentioned because it resolves these issues. If however, you are doing-for an example-some client-side geolocation redirection via JavaScript (that is, using Google Maps API and location object methods), then you may not want to load the entire jQuery library and write your conditional code that checks every version of Internet Explorer/Firefox/etc.

Internet Explorer makes the front-end coding cat unhappy, but jQuery is a plate of milk.