Plugin to handle selection?

Question

Can anyone suggest a plugin which can handle text selections in text areas (cross browser)?

I'm looking for a plugin which can:

Get current selection
Replace current selection
Select a range

(IE uses createTextRange while other browsers use setSelectionRange. There ought to exist an plugin which can do the above so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel.)

Perhaps you can be a bit more specific about the features you would imagine such a plugin would have? — Arend, Feb 20 '12 at 13:43
Not a plugin exactly, but take a look at [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/q/985272/552438). — Anthony Grist, Feb 20 '12 at 13:47

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

jQuery Fieldselection: https://github.com/localhost/jquery-fieldselection

See: https://github.com/localhost/jquery-fieldselection/blob/master/jquery-fieldselection.js

Implements: getSelection, replaceSelection

Does not implement: currentSelection

Rangy: Implements: getSelection, ReplaceSelection, CurrentSelection

(note: not a jquery plugin, but widely applicable still)

A cross-browser JavaScript range and selection library. It provides a simple standards-based API for performing common DOM Range and Selection tasks in all major browsers, abstracting away the wildly different implementations of this functionality between Internet Explorer and DOM-compliant browsers.

Seems to implement what you want, for demo's see: http://rangy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/core.html

http://code.google.com/p/rangy/

See also: Jquery: selectionStart for non textarea elements

Rangyinputs A jquery plugin that offers similar functionality as Rangy, except for inputs instead of arbitrairy DOM elements.

A small cross-browser JavaScript library for obtaining and manipulating selections within and HTML elements.

Demo: http://rangyinputs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/textinputs_jquery.html

Project: http://code.google.com/p/rangyinputs/

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '14 at 08:55

I tried many of the links present here, and others from the jQuery plugin repository, and none of them worked the way I wanted.

But there is this one, not mentionned here, that is really interesting :

http://madapaja.github.io/jquery.selection/

Hope it'll helps ! :)

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 19 '16 at 17:50

http://codepen.io/mattsich/pen/MKvmxQ for an iOS style selection I built. Ends up being just this:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $(".full-text").selectBars('.full-text', 'ipsum', function(){
    $('.selected-text p').text($('.full-text').attr('data-selected'));
  });

});

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 20 '12 at 13:52

0

Below plugin may help you http://www.examplet.buss.hk/jquery/caret.php

It was helpful too me

answered Feb 20 '12 at 13:52

Nimit Dudani

4,840
3
31
46

jgauffin · Answer 5 · 2014-03-17T19:56:24.373

I created my own. Only 2.6kb uncompressed: http://blog.gauffin.org/2012/02/a-javascript-selection-script/

//jQuery is not required but supported.
var selection = new textSelector($('#mytextarea'));
selection.replace('New text');

// you can change selection:
selection.select(1,10); // select char 1 to 10

// get selection
console.log("Start char: " + selection.get().start);

// check if anything is selected
selection.isSelected();

// get the text
var text = selection.text();

It's available at github: https://raw.github.com/jgauffin/griffin.editor/master/Source/textselector.js

Plugin to handle selection?

5 Answers5

Linked