highlight all text in textarea

Question

I want to select all of the text inside of a textarea when a user clicks the textarea. I tried onclick="this.focus()", but this didn't do anything. I tried onclick="this.highlight()", but this caused an error. What should I do?

Answer 1

This may annoy your users since it prevents the useful default behaviour of placing the caret where the user clicked and I therefore recommend against it in general. That said, the solution for most browsers is onclick="this.select()".

However, this will not work in Chrome [UPDATE February 2014: it does now seem to work in recent versions of Chrome]. For a workaround and general background on this issue, see the following question: jQuery - select all text from a textarea

Answer 2

onclick="this.focus();this.select()" readonly="readonly"