Question

I have a weird problem. I don’t quite know how to approach it. We have an application that spits out paragraphs of text with each and every word wrapped in a span with an ID. I am being asked to make a JavaScript to capture the ID’s of all the words that a user highlights.

So a simple example of a paragraph is below.

<span id="p-58" class="softWord" onClick="setTranscriptPosition(-58);return false"> that </span>
<span id="p177" class="softWord" onClick="setTranscriptPosition(177);return false"> quake </span>
<span id="p857" class="softWord" onClick="setTranscriptPosition(857);return false"> briefly </span>
<span id="p1697" class="softWord" onClick="setTranscriptPosition(1697);return false"> triggering </span>
<span id="p2267" class="softWord" onClick="setTranscriptPosition(2267);return false"> another </span>
<span id="p2697" class="softWord" onClick="setTranscriptPosition(2697);return false"> tsunami </span>

I know there is a way to capture the selected text using something like this:(found this at site http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/02/get-user-selected-text-with-jquery-and.html)

function getSelected() {
    if(window.getSelection) { return window.getSelection(); }
        else if(document.getSelection) { return document.getSelection(); }
                    else {
                            var selection = document.selection && document.selection.createRange();
                            if(selection.text) { return selection.text; }
                return false;
            }
            return false;
        }

How would i get the id’s of those spans though?

Answer 1

Ok, this will do exactly what you need. It’s thanks to my friend’s work on a project we did together, so the credit belongs to him:

http://jsfiddle.net/KC48j/11/

Just select some text and hit the button. EDIT: updated to work with IE as well. You can mess around with the logic yourself (how it handles whitespace between words is up to you).