React Router: How to Use the useParams() Hook

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React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. One of the great things about React is that it allows you to use hooks to add functionality to your components. In this article, we will discuss how to use the useParams() hook in React. We will also provide some examples of how you can use this hook to improve your web applications.

Introducing useParams()

The useParams() hook is a React Router hook that allows you to access the parameters of the current URL. This can be useful if you want to dynamically render content based on the URL parameters. For example, if you have a blog application, you may want to render different articles based on the article ID in the URL.

React Router

React Router provides a number of other hooks that you can use to add functionality to your React components. The useParams() hook comes from the react-router package. To use this hook, you will need to install React Router in your project. In order to install React Router, you will need to use a package manager such as npm or yarn. React Router has great documentation and tutorials, on how to get started. You can access the tutorial to set up React Router here.

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Utilizing useParams()

Once you have React Router installed in your project, you can access the useParams() hook from the react-router package. You can import this hook into your component like so:

import { useParams } from ‘react-router’;

The useParams() hook returns an object that contains the parameters of the current URL. For example, if you have a Route like so:

<Route path="/articles/:articleId" />

And the URL is:

/articles/123

The useParams() hook will return an object with a key of articleId and a value of 123. You can access the values of the URL parameters by destructuring the object returned by useParams(). For example:

const { articleId } = useParams();
console.log(articleId); // 123

You can then use the articleId parameter to dynamically render content in your component.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed how to use the useParams() hook in React. We have also provided an example of how you can use this hook to improve your web applications. I hope this article taught you something. Good luck with your coding interviews!