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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T20:18:04+00:00

I’m trying to generate the complete sentence in which a word was highlighted using

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I’m trying to generate the complete sentence in which a word was highlighted using javascript.

window.getSelection

get me the highlighted word. I have been searching for examples of javascript ranges but still don’t fully understand how to loop by moving the selection backwards till a punctuation is found and then forwards till a punctuation is found.

example:

Social media has a fraught relationship with neurosis. Obsessive
people are essential to sites like Facebook and Twitter. They add
energy and buzz. Their identities get tied up with their avatars, and
that in itself makes the sites seem important. They provide much of
the content. A study published last fall reported that twenty thousand
users on Twitter provide half of what’s read there. But obsessives are
dangerous, too. They can make the site seem creepy.

if I selected the word “Facebook” above, my final string should be “Obsessive people are essential to sites like Facebook and Twitter.”

Update 1:

the code mentioned below works but stops if there are html tags.

Example:

If you delve into the Commerce Department report, you can find some even more disappointing
numbers. Setting aside the production of inventories—goods that
companies add to their stockpiles in anticipation of selling them
later—the economy grew by just 1.6 per cent in the quarter.
Capital investment, which should be surging at this point in the
recovery, hardly rose at all. And personal disposable income—the
amount of money people have to spend after paying taxes—expanded
by just 0.4 per cent.

by selecting “find” above, the output sentence is “you can find some even more disappointing numbers” instead of “If you delve into the Commerce Department report, you can find some even more disappointing numbers”

how would I remove tags while matching before and after?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    window.getSelection returns a Selection object, from which you can obtain a Range, which, in turn, provides you with start and end offsets. The rest is obvious:

    rng = window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0)
start = rng.startOffset
end = rng.endOffset
text = rng.startContainer.nodeValue

before = text.substr(0, start)
sel = text.substr(start, end - start)
after = text.substr(end)

sentence = before.match(/[^.!?]*$/)[0] +  sel + after.match(/^[^.!?]*/)[0]

    This works in FF and Chrome, IIRC, things look different in MSIE. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms535869%28v=vs.85%29.aspx for more info.

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