Question

Is it possible to retrive selected text outside textbox?
I had seen solutions to get text from input forms and textareas, similar to this:
http://laboratorium.0xab.cd/jquery/fieldselection/0.2.3-test/test.html
but can this aplied on HTML text (inside div element)?

For example, I want user to be able to bold selected text which is not in textarea.

Answer 1

Yes, it’s possible. IE and other browsers have rather different mechanisms for dealing with selections. If you simply want the selected text, the following will do it:

function getSelectedText() {
    var text = "";
    if (window.getSelection) {
        text = "" + window.getSelection();
    } else if (document.selection && document.selection.createRange &&
            document.selection.type == "Text") {
        text = document.selection.createRange().text;
    }
    return text;
}

To address your specific question, you can use document.execCommand("bold", null, false); to make the current selection bold. In non-IE browsers you have to temporarily put the document into edit mode first though:

function toggleSelectionBold() {
    var range, sel;
    if (window.getSelection) {
        // Non-IE case
        sel = window.getSelection();
        if (sel.getRangeAt) {
            range = sel.getRangeAt(0);
        }
        document.designMode = "on";
        if (range) {
            sel.removeAllRanges();
            sel.addRange(range);
        }
        document.execCommand("bold", null, false);
        document.designMode = "off";
    } else if (document.selection && document.selection.createRange &&
            document.selection.type != "None") {
        // IE case
        range = document.selection.createRange();
        range.execCommand("bold", null, false);
    }
}