How to get the start and end points of selection in text area?

Question

I want to get the cursor start and end position of a selected range in a text-field or text-area.

I tried lot of functions in various forums, but when the last character of the selection is a new line character JavaScript ignore it in IE6.

How do I get the start and end points of the selection?

Answer 1

Revised answer, 5 September 2010

To account for trailing line breaks is tricky in IE, and I haven't seen any solution that does this. It is possible, however. The following is a new version of what I previously posted here.

Note that the textarea must have focus for this function to work properly in IE. If in doubt, call the textarea's focus() method first.

function getInputSelection(el) {
    var start = 0, end = 0, normalizedValue, range,
        textInputRange, len, endRange;

    if (typeof el.selectionStart == "number" && typeof el.selectionEnd == "number") {
        start = el.selectionStart;
        end = el.selectionEnd;
    } else {
        range = document.selection.createRange();

        if (range && range.parentElement() == el) {
            len = el.value.length;
            normalizedValue = el.value.replace(/\r\n/g, "\n");

            // Create a working TextRange that lives only in the input
            textInputRange = el.createTextRange();
            textInputRange.moveToBookmark(range.getBookmark());

            // Check if the start and end of the selection are at the very end
            // of the input, since moveStart/moveEnd doesn't return what we want
            // in those cases
            endRange = el.createTextRange();
            endRange.collapse(false);

            if (textInputRange.compareEndPoints("StartToEnd", endRange) > -1) {
                start = end = len;
            } else {
                start = -textInputRange.moveStart("character", -len);
                start += normalizedValue.slice(0, start).split("\n").length - 1;

                if (textInputRange.compareEndPoints("EndToEnd", endRange) > -1) {
                    end = len;
                } else {
                    end = -textInputRange.moveEnd("character", -len);
                    end += normalizedValue.slice(0, end).split("\n").length - 1;
                }
            }
        }
    }

    return {
        start: start,
        end: end
    };
}

Answer 2

Use the Rangy api and all of your problems are gone gone gone ^_gone...

Using it

Read the documentation, or just use the below.
Very simple,

var selection = rangy.getSelection(),  // Whole lot of information, supports
                                       // multi-selections too.
    start   = selection.anchorOffset,  // Start position
    end     = selection.focusOffset;   // End position

Hope this api helps you out because it is really helpful in handling cross-browser ranges.