The regular expression could quite likely be improved. It simply looks for name-value pairs, separated by = characters, and pairs themselves separated by & characters (or an = character for the first one). For your example, the above would result in:
Maybe this should go to codereview SE, but here is safer and regexp-free code:
function getJsonFromUrl(url) {
if(!url) url = location.href;
var question = url.indexOf("?");
var hash = url.indexOf("#");
if(hash==-1 && question==-1) return {};
if(hash==-1) hash = url.length;
var query = question==-1 || hash==question+1 ? url.substring(hash) :
url.substring(question+1,hash);
var result = {};
query.split("&").forEach(function(part) {
if(!part) return;
part = part.split("+").join(" "); // replace every + with space, regexp-free version
var eq = part.indexOf("=");
var key = eq>-1 ? part.substr(0,eq) : part;
var val = eq>-1 ? decodeURIComponent(part.substr(eq+1)) : "";
var from = key.indexOf("[");
if(from==-1) result[decodeURIComponent(key)] = val;
else {
var to = key.indexOf("]",from);
var index = decodeURIComponent(key.substring(from+1,to));
key = decodeURIComponent(key.substring(0,from));
if(!result[key]) result[key] = [];
if(!index) result[key].push(val);
else result[key][index] = val;
}
});
return result;
}
This function can parse even URLs like
var url = "?foo%20e[]=a%20a&foo+e[%5Bx%5D]=b&foo e[]=c";
// {"foo e": ["a a", "c", "[x]":"b"]}
var obj = getJsonFromUrl(url)["foo e"];
for(var key in obj) { // Array.forEach would skip string keys here
console.log(key,":",obj[key]);
}
/*
0 : a a
1 : c
[x] : b
*/