[javascript] Get current URL from IFRAME

Is there a simple way to get the current URL from an iframe?

The viewer would going through multiple sites. I'm guessing I would be using something in javascript.

This question is related to javascript url iframe

The answer is


If your iframe is from another domain, (cross domain), the other answers are not going to help you... you will simply need to use this:

var currentUrl = document.referrer;

and - here you've got the main url!


I had an issue with blob url hrefs. So, with a reference to the iframe, I just produced an url from the iframe's src attribute:

    const iframeReference = document.getElementById("iframe_id");
    const iframeUrl = iframeReference ? new URL(iframeReference.src) : undefined;
    if (iframeUrl) {
        console.log("Voila: " + iframeUrl);
    } else {
        console.warn("iframe with id iframe_id not found");
    }

If you are in the iframe context,

you could do

const currentIframeHref = new URL(document.location.href);
const urlOrigin = currentIframeHref.origin;
const urlFilePath = decodeURIComponent(currentIframeHref.pathname);

If you are in the parent window/frame, then you can use https://stackoverflow.com/a/938195/2305243 's answer, which is

document.getElementById("iframe_id").contentWindow.location.href

Some additional information for anyone who might be struggling with this:

You'll be getting null values if you're trying to get URL from iframe before it's loaded. I solved this problem by creating the whole iframe in javascript and getting the values I needed with the onLoad function:

var iframe = document.createElement('iframe');
iframe.onload = function() {

    //some custom settings
    this.width=screen.width;this.height=screen.height; this.passing=0; this.frameBorder="0";

    var href = iframe.contentWindow.location.href;
    var origin = iframe.contentWindow.location.origin;
    var url = iframe.contentWindow.location.url;
    var path = iframe.contentWindow.location.pathname;

    console.log("href: ", href)
    console.log("origin: ", origin)
    console.log("path: ", path)
    console.log("url: ", url)
};

iframe.src = 'http://localhost/folder/index.html';

document.body.appendChild(iframe);

Because of the same-origin policy, I had problems when accessing "cross origin" frames - I solved that by running a webserver locally instead of running all the files directly from my disk. In order for all of this to work, you need to be accessing the iframe with the same protocol, hostname and port as the origin. Not sure which of these was/were missing when running all files from my disk.

Also, more on location objects: https://www.w3schools.com/JSREF/obj_location.asp


Hope this will help some how in your case, I suffered with the exact same problem, and just used localstorage to share the data between parent window and iframe. So in parent window you can:

localStorage.setItem("url", myUrl);

And in code where iframe source is just get this data from localstorage:

localStorage.getItem('url');

Saved me a lot of time. As far as i can see the only condition is access to the parent page code. Hope this will help someone.


If you're inside an iframe that don't have cross domain src, or src is empty:

Then:

function getOriginUrl() {
    var href = document.location.href;
    var referrer = document.referrer;
    // Check if window.frameElement not null
    if(window.frameElement) {
        href = window.frameElement.ownerDocument.location.href;
        // This one will be origin
        if(window.frameElement.ownerDocument.referrer != "") {
            referrer = window.frameElement.ownerDocument.referrer;
        }
    }
    // Compare if href not equal to referrer
    if(href != referrer) {
        // Take referrer as origin
        return referrer;
    } else {
        // Take href
        return href
    }
}

If you're inside an iframe with cross domain src:

Then:

function getOriginUrl() {
    var href = document.location.href;
    var referrer = document.referrer;
    // Detect if you're inside an iframe
    if(window.parent != window) {
        // Take referrer as origin
        return referrer;
    } else {
        // Take href
        return href;
    }
}

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