Preserved Topic: Reading values from a url?

Is it possible for Javascript to read values from a url like this:
htp://whatever.com/file.html?var=val

It seems like such a simple thing to do but I can't seem to find it.

Edit:

Ok, I've managed to well... kinda do it. But it's dogey....

flag = (location.search)? 1:0

function contChk() {

	if (flag) {

		re = /[?]([A-Za-z0-9]+)/

		str = location.search

		area = str.replace(re, "$1")

		top.content.location = area + ".html"

		flag = 0

	}

}

I'm using this to specify the target of a frame in the url to the HTML file containing the frameset.

So, whatever.com/index.html?news would load the news.html into the frame named 'content'. I know this seems kinda pointless but it does have it's uses.

I still think there'd be an easier way to read values from a url but for some reason I just can't find it!

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 10-14-2001).]

Yeah, location.search will return the string "?news". If you know the string will be as simple as that, you can simply run a test:

if (location.search.indexOf("news") != -1)
{
// load news
}

If there may be more complicated things, like "?news=yes&chocolate=good" then you may have to do some more complicated things. You can do them with regular expressions or with the indexOf function.

Cool, I didn't know about .indexOf, I'll have to play around with this...

Thanks Slime.

if (location.search.match(/\?(.+)/))

	top.content.location = RegExp.$1 + ".html";

You can tighten your code a bit like the above.