Question

I’m thinking if there is a way to use javascript to pick up ANY ONE sentence from a textarea simply by clicking any position within that sentence.

I’m thinking along the line of
– first, get current cursor position (which I know how)
– second, somehow locate the position of the previous fullstop and the next fullstop (how?)
– take whatever content within the two fullstops. (how?)

Or there is a simple way to do it?

Answer 1

I assume you already know about handling caret position and getting the content before / after the caret, so here’s a pseudocode solution:

• User clicks on textarea
• Get current caret position
• Store everything before caret position in variable A
• Store everything after caret position in variable B
• Find position of last full stop in A using lastIndexOf()
• Find position of first full stop in B using indexOf()
• Handle situations where full stop is not found
  • set position to 0 in case of A
  • end of string in case of B)
• Take substring (last_pos, end_pos) from A
• Take substring (0, first_pos) from B
• Combine substrings.