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Inserting a text where cursor is using Javascript/jquery

Asked 2009-06-30T14:47:42.360
185

I have a page with a lot of textboxes. When someone clicks a link, i want a word or two to be inserted where the cursor is, or appended to the textbox which has the focus.

For example, if the cursor/focus is on a textbox saying 'apple' and he clicks a link saying '[email]', then i want the textbox to say, 'apple bob@example.com'.

How can I do this? Is this even possible, since what if the focus is on a radio/dropdown/non textbox element? Can the last focused on textbox be remembered?

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2 Answers

1

The accepted answer didn't work for me on Internet Explorer 9. I checked it and the browser detection was not working properly, it detected ff (firefox) when i was at Internet Explorer.

I just did this change: 

if ($.browser.msie)

Instead of:

if (br == "ie") {

The resulting code is this one:

function insertAtCaret(areaId,text) {
    var txtarea = document.getElementById(areaId);
    var scrollPos = txtarea.scrollTop;
    var strPos = 0;
    var br = ((txtarea.selectionStart || txtarea.selectionStart == '0') ? 
        "ff" : (document.selection ? "ie" : false ) );

    if ($.browser.msie) { 
        txtarea.focus();
        var range = document.selection.createRange();
        range.moveStart ('character', -txtarea.value.length);
        strPos = range.text.length;
    }
    else if (br == "ff") strPos = txtarea.selectionStart;

    var front = (txtarea.value).substring(0,strPos);  
    var back = (txtarea.value).substring(strPos,txtarea.value.length); 
    txtarea.value=front+text+back;
    strPos = strPos + text.length;
    if (br == "ie") { 
        txtarea.focus();
        var range = document.selection.createRange();
        range.moveStart ('character', -txtarea.value.length);
        range.moveStart ('character', strPos);
        range.moveEnd ('character', 0);
        range.select();
    }
    else if (br == "ff") {
        txtarea.selectionStart = strPos;
        txtarea.selectionEnd = strPos;
        txtarea.focus();
    }
    txtarea.scrollTop = scrollPos;
}
answered 2012-10-16T10:48:57.533
0

you can only focus required textbox an insert the text there. there is no way to find out where focus is AFAIK (maybe interating over all DOM nodes?).

check this stackoverflow - it has a solution for you: How do I find out which DOM element has the focus?

answered 2009-06-30T14:50:19.173

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