Question

I have found various examples of using jquery to wrap selected text from a textarea in html tags, but I would like to adapt this slightly to create a list when multiple lines of text are selected.

Currently the code below wraps the whole selection in the list tags but I would also like to replace all the carriage returns with the closing and opening tags for list items – so each line in the text area is a new list item.

I think one of the problems might be that the .val function reads the text area as a single line.

jquery:

function listText(elementID, openTag, closeTag) {
    var textArea = $('#' + elementID);
    var len = textArea.val().length;
    var start = textArea[0].selectionStart;
    var end = textArea[0].selectionEnd;
    var selectedText = textArea.val().substring(start, end);
    var replacement = openTag + selectedText + closeTag;
    textArea.val(textArea.val().substring(0, start) + replacement + textArea.val().substring(end, len));
}

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("#BoldIt").click( function() {
        listText("markItUp", "<ul><li>", "</li></ul>");
    });
});

body:

<textarea id="markItUp" cols="80" rows="20"></textarea>

<br />

<input type="button" value="Bold" id="BoldIt" />

Answer 1

split your text like this:

function listText(elementID, openTag, closeTag) {
    var textArea = $('#' + elementID);
    var s = "\n";
    var len = textArea.val().length;
    var start = textArea[0].selectionStart;
    var end = textArea[0].selectionEnd;
    var selectedText = textArea.val().substring(start, end);
    var replacement = "";

    var rows = selectedText.substring(start, end).split(s);

    for(var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {
    replacement += openTag + rows[i] + closeTag + s;
    }

    textArea.val(textArea.val().substring(0, start) + replacement + textArea.val().substring(end, len));
}

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("#BoldIt").click( function() {
    listText("markItUp", "<ul><li>", "</li></ul>");
    });
});