Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

Mon 24th Oct 2005

Changing Selection

Posted in the evening, filed under JavaScript.

I’ve got an interesting little challenge. I need to be able to programmatically change the document selection, as in the text that is selected, not a select box or anything like that, using JavaScript.

Basically, I want to repeat the effect that appears on the Google Adsense site, where selecting in a textarea selects the contents of that text area. But I want to do it with just a random element. It’s easy with a TextArea, but I want my element to maintain it’s lovely formatting.

I’m not actually sure I can do it. With IE, I can set it up to copy the text to the clipboard, but not select it.

 

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5 Responses to “Changing Selection”

1. Matthew Schinckel said:

   You little ripper!

   sel = window.getSelection();
div = document.getElementById("id");
sel.selectAllChildren(div);

   Works a treat in Mozilla.

   17 minutes after the fact.

2. Matthew Schinckel said:

   IE seems to have the ability to create alterations to it’s selection:

   sel = document.selection.createRange();
div = document.getElementById("id");
sel.moveToElementText(div);

   However, this doesn’t seem to work. If only IE had decent JavaScript console support. Then I might be able to do this without having to save a huge file to the server and back again…

   36 minutes after the fact.

3. Matthew Schinckel said:

   Fuck Internet Explorer.

   It was selecting the whole lot, just not updating the display to reflect it!

   Grr. Minutes wasted.

   48 minutes after the fact.

4. Matthew Schinckel said:

   Doesn’t work in Safari. No selectAllChildren() method.

   Fuck Safari too. But less than IE.

   1 hour, 16 minutes after the fact.

5. Matthew Schinckel said:

   Actually, really fuck internet explorer.

   It is actually setting the selection, or at least creating a range, as I can do an alert(sel.text);, but the selection isn’t really being changed.

   That is, if I Ctrl-C, it is not added to the clipboard. I could use the evil clipboardData = sel.text; command, but I don’t really want to. It’s not really fair to a user to overwrite whatever they had as the clipboard.

   I did find another site that might be doing what I need. They use an href="javascript:highlight(0);", which isn’t the right way to do it, but I suspect it’s textarea only, anyway.

   Oh, and I apologise to IE users who are also getting the crappy resizing as you type I am getting in the comments box!

   17 hours, 15 minutes after the fact.

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