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Get Cursor/Caret Position in Textarea
caret.jsHow can it be so simple?
In mozilla, one can use "textarea.selectionStart" to retrieve the caret position by Javascript.
But what is the case of IE? I've seen
a method that sets end point of a
dummy range to document.selection.createRange() object, but it is not working for me.
Another method
uses for-loop repeatedly to test the end point of these two range objects, which seems to be naive.
Here I propose a simple but a-little-dirty method to retrieve caret position in textarea for IE.
Following is the code:
It simply inserts a dummy character in caret position and removes it after obtaining its position in textarea. Isn't it simple?
function caret(node) {
//node.focus();
/* without node.focus() IE will returns -1 when focus is not on node */
if(node.selectionStart) return node.selectionStart;
else if(!document.selection) return 0;
var c = "\001";
var sel = document.selection.createRange();
var dul = sel.duplicate();
var len = 0;
dul.moveToElementText(node);
sel.text = c;
len = (dul.text.indexOf(c));
sel.moveStart('character',-1);
sel.text = "";
return len;
}