- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:01:49 +0000 (UTC)
On Mon, 10 May 2010, Biju wrote:
>
> Can we have a new DOM property textarea.selectionText which can be used
> to set/get selection text of a TEXTAREA/INPUT type=text.
Gettng the value is relatively easy:
On Mon, 10 May 2010, Biju wrote:
>
> Current way in firefox is to
>
> 1. OrigStart = textarea.selectionStart
But admittedly setting it is a pain:
> 2. textarea.value = textarea.value.substr(0, OrigStart)
> + new_text_to_replace
> + textarea.value.substr(textarea.selectionEnd);
> 3. Now u loose original selection, so
>
> 4. textarea.setSelectionRange(OrigStart, OrigStart+new_text_to_replace.length)
> 5. remember .scrollTop and reapply if needed
I agree that making this easier would be good.
> On IE even though wierd you can do it simply by
> document.selection.createRange().text = new_text_to_replace;
> BTW, you need to make sure the selection is currently on the
> textarea/input form control.
> IE is also very fast when doing that, when firefox hangs few second
> using the other way
IE's version is non-standard and not adopted by other UAs.
On Mon, 10 May 2010, Ojan Vafai wrote:
>
> In addition to selection and scroll issues, needing to replace the
> entire textarea value doesn't scale and thus limits what sorts of things
> you can do with textareas. A general way to set a sub-part of a
> textarea's value seems useful to me. I don't think we should tie that to
> setting the selected text though.
>
> textarea.setRangeText(start, end, text);
>
> It replaces the text between start and end, maintains current scroll
> position and preserves the selection.
On Tue, 11 May 2010, Biju wrote:
>
> Both have advantages
>
> Option 1 (textobj.selectionText) advantages
> * No need for web developer to provide selection start/end
> * Automatically select the newly inserted text,
> (as most time that is what you want)
> * No need for web developer to calculate selection start/end for
> setting it after text insert
> * preserve scroll
> * Has both Getter and Setter
>
> Option 2 (textobj.setRangeText(start, end, text)); advantages
> * Independent of selection, web developer can change text at any range
> with out affecting selection
> * Web developer has more options with it.
> * preserve scroll
>
> So I want to merge both suggestion, with a new signature,
> also trying to reduce coding for web developer "less code less bug"
>
> textobj.setRangeText(newtext, start, end, cursorpos)
>
> parameters:
> newtext
> - optional parameter
> - new text that will replace existing
> - if missing/null/undefined/NaN then default to ""
>
> start
> - optional parameter
> - starting position of the original textobj text that need to be replaced
> - if missing/null/undefined/NaN then default to textobj.selectionStart
> - negative value make start position from last character in the text content
>
> end
> - optional parameter
> - ending position of the original textobj text that need to be replaced
> - if missing/null/undefined/NaN then default to textobj.selectionEnd
> - negative value make end position from last character
>
> cursorpos
> - optional parameter
> - if missing/null/undefined/NaN then default to 0
> - what should happen to cursor/selection after text insert, its values are
> - - 0 - select the newly inserted text
> - - 1 - place cursor at beginning of inserted text
> - - 2 - place cursor at the end of inserted text
> - - 3 - keep selection unaffected
> * issue, when value is 3 what should we do when setRangeText is replacing text
> which has some parts selected and some other parts unselected
>
>
> so if somebody want replace selection text it is just
> textobj.setRangeText(newtext);
> which is almost same as my original proposal, and
> textobj.setRangeText();
> will blank a selection
That seems a bit overly complicated, but something in that vein seems
reasonable.
I've added
setRangeText(newText); // replace selection with newText
setRangeText(newText, start, end); // replace given range with newText
setRangeText(newText, start, end, action); // see below
...where action is one of:
'select': selects the new text
'start': selects empty range at start of new text
'end': selects empty range at end of new text
'preserve': (default) set selection as follows:
- if selection start was before range, leave as is
- if selection start was after the old range, put it as far from the
end of the new range as it was from the end of the old range
- if selection start was in the old range, move it to the start of the
new range
- if selection end was before range, leave as is
- if selection end was after the old range, put it as far from the
end of the new range as it was from the end of the old range
- if selection emd was in the old range, move it to the end of the
new range
> We could also add a getter method, also with optional parameters
> textobj.getRangeText(start, end)
> so,
> textobj.getRangeText() gives current selection
> textobj.getRangeText(0) gives from start of text to current selection end
> textobj.getRangeText(null, -1) gives from current selection start to end of text
Getting the text from a range is already rather simple (as demonstrated at
the top of this e-mail), so I don't think that's necessary.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 27 April 2012 21:01:49 UTC