jQuery.getUrlVars

This is my take on an often necessary task, especially since the advent of so-called Web 2.0, AJAX, and now the HTML5 History API.

jQuery.getUrlVars differs from other implementations by interpreting both the search and hash as members of the same object. If a key is found in multiple places, the value is appended to an array in the returned object.

One place for improvement I see is storing the requests in a cache indexed by URL. If a request is made for the exact same string, we could quickly return a compiled object instead of repeating the same calculations. — completed as of 2013-02-21