Is there an Internet Explorer approved substitute for selectionStart and selectionEnd?

Question

Finding out what's selected in real browsers is as simple as:

var range = {
  start: textbox.selectionStart,
  end: textbox.selectionEnd
}

But IE, as usual, doesn't understand. What's the best cross-browser way to do this?

Answer 1

I'll post this function for another time, seeing as this question got linked to from another one.

The following will do the job in all browsers and deals with all new line problems without seriously compromising performance. I've arrived at this after some toing and froing and now I'm pretty convinced it's the best such function around.

UPDATE

This function does assume the textarea/input has focus, so you may need to call the textarea's focus() method before calling it.

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
    };
}

var el = document.getElementById("your_input");
el.focus();
var sel = getInputSelection(el);
alert(sel.start + ", " + sel.end);