Question

Is there any event listener for highlight event in HTML using JavaScript (sort of onHighlight)? Is it possible to get the text highlighted?

Answer 1

Try the following:

function getSelectedText() {
    if (window.getSelection) { // All browsers except IE <9
        return window.getSelection().toString();
    } else if (document.selection) { // IE <9
        return document.selection.createRange().text;
    }
}

All browsers (except for IE <9) support window.getSelection(); IE <9 supports document.selection.createRange().text.

The function can be attached to onmouseup, if you wish to support mouse-based selection, or onkeyup, if you wish to support keyboard-based selection.

As Robby Shaw mentions below, QuirksMode’s Introduction to Range is fairly useful for understanding Range objects, which this code is based off.