Question

I’m curious if there’s a way to style content in a textarea as a user types.

For example:

<textarea>abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz</textarea>

Could I highlight all the vowels in the above textarea string on screen using javascript? But still only send the string when the form is submitted?

Answer 1

You can use a div with contentEditable attribute instead of textarea and to do the highlighting there.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Content_Editable

You will still need to copy the content of this div to a hidden field of a form if you need to post it.