Question

Assuming the cursor position in a tinymce editor is inside a paragraph.
When a user hits backspace i need to know which character will get deleted.
It is necessary to know this before the character gets removed (onKeyDown is ok, onKeyUp is too late).

How can i find out which character gets deleted on backspace (before it actually gets deleted)?

Answer 1

in one of my plugins i set onKeyDown

ed.onKeyDown.add(function(ed, evt) {
  if (paragraph && evt.keyCode == 8 && ed.selection.isCollapsed()) {

        //insert special marker char
    var value = '<span id="__ircaret" class="ircaret">\u2060</span>';
    ed.selection.setContent(value, {format : 'raw', no_events: 1});

    // node is the dom node the caret is placed in
    var node = ed.selection.getNode();
    var node_content = $(node).text();

    var position = node_content.search('\u2060');

        // this is the character
    var char_vor_cursor = position != 0 ? node_content.slice(position - 1, position) : '';

    // Test for soft-hyphen
    if (char_vor_cursor != '' && char_vor_cursor.charCodeAt(0) == 173) {
        // correct innerHTML
                var text_after_backspace = node_content.slice(0, position - 1) + '<span id="__ircaret" class="ircaret">\u2060</span>' +  node_content.slice(position + 1);
        node.innerHTML = text_after_backspace;
    }
    var caret_node = $(node).find('#__ircaret').get(0);

    // select caretnode and remove
    ed.selection.select(caret_node);
    $(ed.getBody()).find('.ircaret').remove();
  }
}