What is the difference between document location href and document location

Question

What is the difference  between document location href and document location   Is it the same across browsers

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As of June 14th 2013  HTML5   there is a significant difference Browser   Chrome 27 X X References  document location  window location  MDN   document location type  Object The object when called by itself document location return its origin   pathname properties concatenated  To retrieve just the URL as a string  the read-only document URL property can be used  ancestorOrigins  DOMStringList assign  function       native code    hash   quot  quot  host   quot stackoverflow com quot  hostname   quot stackoverflow com quot  href   quot http   stackoverflow com questions 2652816 what-is-the-difference-between-document-location-href-and-document-location rq 1 quot  origin   quot http   stackoverflow com quot  pathname   quot  questions 2652816 what-is-the-difference-between-document-location-href-and-document-location quot  port   quot  quot  protocol   quot http  quot  reload  function       native code    replace  function       native code    search   quot  rq 1 quot  toString  function toString      native code    valueOf  function valueOf      native code      document location href type  string http   stackoverflow com questions 2652816 what-is-the-difference-between-document-location-href-and-document-location rq 1

User · Answer

document location is an object  while document location href is a string  But the former has a toString method  so you can read from it as if it was a string and get the same value as document location href   In some browsers - most modern ones  I think - you can also assign to document location as if it were a string  According to the Mozilla documentation however  it is better to use window location for this purpose as document location was originally read-only and so may not be as widely supported

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Here is an example of the practical significance of the difference and how it can bite you if you don t realize it  document location being an object and document location href being a string    We use MonoX Social CMS  http   mono-software com  free version at http   social ClipFlair net and we wanted to add the language bar WebPart at some pages to localize them  but at some others  e g  at discussions  we didn t want to use localization  So we made two master pages to use at all our  aspx  ASP net  pages  in the first one we had the language bar WebPart and the other one had the following script to remove the  lng el-GR etc  from the URLs and show the default  English in our case  language instead for those pages   lt script gt    var curAddr   document location    MISTAKE   var newAddr   curAddr replace new RegExp   lng  a-z  2 - A-Z  2     gi           if  curAddr    newAddr      document location   newAddr   lt  script gt    But this code isn t working  replace function just returns Undefined  no exception thrown  so it tries to navigate to say x lng el-GR undefined instead of going to url x  Checking it out with Mozilla Firefox s debugger  F12 key  and moving the cursor over the curAddr variable it was showing lots of info instead of some simple string value for the URL  Selecting Watch from that popup you could see in the watch pane it was writing  Location -       instead of       for the url  That made me realize it was an object  One would have expected replace to throw an exception or something  but now that I think of it the problem was that it was trying to call some non-existent  replace  method on the URL object which seems to just give back  undefined  in Javascript   The correct code in that case is    lt script gt    var curAddr   document location href    CORRECT   var newAddr   curAddr replace new RegExp   lng  a-z  2 - A-Z  2     gi           if  curAddr    newAddr      document location   newAddr   lt  script gt

User · Answer

document location is deprecated in favor of window location  which can be accessed by just location  since it s a global object   The location object has multiple properties and methods  If you try to use it as a string then it acts like location href

User · Answer

document location is a synonym for window location that has been deprecated for almost as long as JavaScript has existed  Don t use it   location is a structured object  with properties corresponding to the parts of the URL  location href is the whole URL in a single string  Assigning a string to either is defined to cause the same kind of navigation  so take your pick   I consider writing to location href   something to be marginally better as it s slightly more explicit about what it s doing  You generally want to avoid just location   something as it looks misleadingly like a variable assignment  window location   something is fine though

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typeof document location      object  typeof document location href      string    The href property is a string  while document location itself is an object

User · Answer

The document location is an object that contains properties for the current location   The href property is one of these properties  containing the complete URL  i e  all the other properties put together   Some browsers allow you to assign an URL to the location object and acts as if you assigned it to the href property  Some other browsers are more picky  and requires you to use the href property  Thus  to make the code work in all browsers  you have to use the href property   Both the window and document objects has a location object  You can set the URL using either window location href or document location href  However  logically the document location object should be read-only  as you can t change the URL of a document  changing the URL loads a new document   so to be on the safe side you should rather use window location href when you want to set the URL

[javascript] What is the difference between document.location.href and document.location?

document.location

document.location.href

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