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If you ever had a specific case where you had to retrieve the position of a caret (your cursor's position) inside an HTML input field, you can do so using the selectionStart property of an input's value.
If there is no selection, you can use the properties . selectionStart or . selectionEnd (with no selection they're equal). var cursorPosition = $('#myTextarea').
You also need the input's selectionDirection to get the caret position whenever selectionDirection is backward i.e. you make a selection left-ward in the textbox so that selectionStart is the caret, but when selectionDirection is forward the caret will be at selectionEnd.
Easier update:
Use field.selectionStart example in this answer.
Thanks to @commonSenseCode for pointing this out.
Old answer:
Found this solution. Not jquery based but there is no problem to integrate it to jquery:
/*
** Returns the caret (cursor) position of the specified text field (oField).
** Return value range is 0-oField.value.length.
*/
function doGetCaretPosition (oField) {
// Initialize
var iCaretPos = 0;
// IE Support
if (document.selection) {
// Set focus on the element
oField.focus();
// To get cursor position, get empty selection range
var oSel = document.selection.createRange();
// Move selection start to 0 position
oSel.moveStart('character', -oField.value.length);
// The caret position is selection length
iCaretPos = oSel.text.length;
}
// Firefox support
else if (oField.selectionStart || oField.selectionStart == '0')
iCaretPos = oField.selectionDirection=='backward' ? oField.selectionStart : oField.selectionEnd;
// Return results
return iCaretPos;
}
Use selectionStart. It is compatible with all major browsers.
document.getElementById('foobar').addEventListener('keyup', e => {
console.log('Caret at: ', e.target.selectionStart)
})<input id="foobar" />This works only when no type is defined or type="text" or type="textarea" on the input.
I've wrapped the functionality in bezmax's answer into jQuery if anyone wants to use it.
(function($) {
$.fn.getCursorPosition = function() {
var input = this.get(0);
if (!input) return; // No (input) element found
if ('selectionStart' in input) {
// Standard-compliant browsers
return input.selectionStart;
} else if (document.selection) {
// IE
input.focus();
var sel = document.selection.createRange();
var selLen = document.selection.createRange().text.length;
sel.moveStart('character', -input.value.length);
return sel.text.length - selLen;
}
}
})(jQuery);
Got a very simple solution. Try the following code with verified result-
<html>
<head>
<script>
function f1(el) {
var val = el.value;
alert(val.slice(0, el.selectionStart).length);
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<input type=text id=t1 value=abcd>
<button onclick="f1(document.getElementById('t1'))">check position</button>
</body>
</html>
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