Question

If I have a string in a div

<div id="article">
 lots of text goes here
<strong> it's really interesting</strong>
and it's free to read
</div>

if a user double click or single click on a particular word, is there a way to determine the position/index of the character clicked?

If that cannot be done, how about determining how many space character there are before the clicked position. So if I click on the word ‘goes’ in the above example, it returns 3 because there are three spaces before the word goes which is clicked.

Thank You very much for your time.

Answer 1

The ugly hack solution to such a problem involves programming converting the characters into event capturing objects.

For instance

<div id="article">
<span>lots </span><span>of </span><span>text</span>...
</div>

Now this can be done programmatically.
You can grab whatever the current content of a div and convert it to something like the formatting above. Then attach event handlers to the contained spans which count the number of spans preceding it in the same container.