Question

I’m looking for a way to set a selection in a textarea in Internet Explorer. In other browsers, this works just fine:

textarea.selectionStart = start;
textarea.selectionEnd = end;

In IE, I assume I have to use createRange and adjust the selection somehow, but I cannot figure out how.

Extra bonus points for a link to a proper documentation about createRange and associated methods, MSDN isn’t helping out much.

Answer 1

This works for me:

<textarea id="lol">
noasdfkvbsdobfbgvobosdobfbgoasopdobfgbooaodfgh
</textarea>

<script>
var range = document.getElementById('lol').createTextRange();
range.collapse(true);
range.moveStart('character', 5);
range.moveEnd('character', 10);
range.select();
</script>

Useful links:

• http://help.dottoro.com/ljlwflaq.php
• http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/ncz/
• http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/range_intro.html

moveStart() at MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536623%28VS.85%29.aspx

moveEnd() at MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536620%28VS.85%29.aspx