Matching search params object/map/array

[OliverJAsh]

I'm curious whether we could match the search params using a richer structure than just string so that we don't need to worry about matching characters such as & or =. For example:

 const p = new URLPattern({
   protocol: 'https',
   username: '',
   password: '',
   hostname: 'example.com',
   port: '',
   pathname: '/foo/:image.jpg',
-  search: '',
+  searchParams: [['foo', 'bar'], ['abc', '*']],
   hash: '*',
 });

For example, this would match a search of:

• foo=bar&abc=123
• abc=456&foo=bar

I thought about whether we could re-use URLSearchParams but I'm not sure we can, because we don't want to encode characters for pattern matching. Perhaps we could introduce a URLSearchParamsPattern. This would allow it to be used on its own.

[wanderview]

I agree that pattern syntax is not really fit for extracting search params since they can be re-ordered. My current expectation is that code that wants to get parameter values out would need to use URLSearchParams to parse the query params and then operate on them individually.

We could consider adding some kind of map-like matching construct like you suggest in the future. It would be helpful to see use cases where it provides significant benefit over using just URLSearchParams itself.