regex - Extract keyword from Google search in Javascript

Question

I'd like to extract from the url of a Google search the keyword of the search (e.g. for the keyword "car" : http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=car&aq ... (here car is between "q=" and "&aq" but I noticed that the tokens might change ["&ie" instead of "&aq"]).

Being new at regex and Google search I haven't found so far the solution, does someone know how to do this please ?

Bruno

Answer 1

You don't need a regular expression for this. Modified from http://jquery-howto.blogspot.com/2009/09/get-url-parameters-values-with-jquery.html:

function getUrlVars(href)
{
    var vars = [], hash;
    var hashes = href.slice(href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&');
    for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++)
    {
        hash = hashes[i].split('=');
        vars.push(hash[0]);
        vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
    }
    return vars;
}

You can then do this:

var v = getUrlVars("http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=car&aq");
var q = v.q;