How do I select arbitrary text on the page using javascript?

Question

Let's say I have a contentEditable div, to the user can edit and change the text and elements inside it. How do I arbitrarily change the selection in this div with javascript? By "change" I don't mean "change the contents of whatever the user has selected", I mean actually change what is selected. The user should then be able to type over the selection, replacing it with something else.

This should take into account that I may want to select text across elements. For instance:

<p>Some text <span>goes</span> here.</p>

I may for instance want to select "Some text go", or everything inside the <p>.

This only needs to work in Safari/Webkit.

Thanks in advance. As a native code developer, I find the DOM and Javascript in general quite frustrating.

Answer 1

Just to answer my own question in detail so anyone searching for something similar doesn't have to go looking elsewhere...

The code I ended up using was something like this:

var range = document.createRange();
range.setStart( <get the node the selection starts in>, <char offset in that node> );
range.setEnd( <get the node the selection ends in>, <char offset in that node> ); 

window.getSelection().removeAllRanges();
window.getSelection().addRange(range);

Big thanks to James Black for pointing me in the right direction.