Highlight part of the formatted textarea or div text from and to specified position in IE

Question

I have pretty good function that do what I need, but in IE it doesn't consider linebreaks and, maybe, some other stuff.

The function is next:

    this.createSelection = function (field, start, end) {
        if (field.createTextRange) {
            var selRange = field.createTextRange();
            selRange.collapse(true);
            selRange.moveStart('character', start);
            selRange.moveEnd('character', end - start);
            selRange.select();
        } else if (field.setSelectionRange) {
            field.setSelectionRange(start, end);
        } else if (field.selectionStart) {
            field.selectionStart = start;
            field.selectionEnd = end;
        }
        field.focus();
    }

It needs to be modified in two points:

1. Highlight correct part of the text with linebreaks and other stuff.

2. Highlight not only inside textarea, but even in div, p, span etc.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I've published a function many times on Stack Overflow that does this for textareas and text inputs, handling line breaks correctly. Here's an example:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/3373056/96100

Doing the same for selections within regular HTML elements is trickier, and also less well-defined. Here's an answer about this:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/9841644/96100