Javascript - Change font color of certain text in textarea

Question

Is there any JS function that can change the color of certain text in a textarea?

For example, blar blar {blar} blar, {blar}, including { }, will be in blue. Other words will be in blank. In other words, all I need is a function that can change color of all text in { }.

I've done some studies and it seems that most people say it can't be done. But I'm seeing rich text editors or those wysiwyg editors having the ability to bold or underline words. There must be a way to do it.

Any suggestion is welcome.

Answer 1

No one mentioned contentEditable?
Just make a contentEditable div and use javascript to style it.
I reccommend you to look into the Dojo Toolkit's.
It has a Editor widget.

Other resources:
Some contentEditable problems in IE.
How to use contentEditable with jQuery or without it.

Answer 2

wysiwig-editors are using iframes instead of textareas. Textareas are very little customizable, since what you're after is changing part of the content. You can't add tags inside a textarea, which makes it impossible to only change part of the text.

If you look at the editor here in SO, you write normal text inside a textarea, and it is then transformed in the box below it, so you'll see the asterix inside the textbox, but in the box below, it'll transform special characters by regexing them with tags.

If you're using firebug, you can start writing inside the editor, while looking at the HTML in the preview-box.