I'm attempting to create a study tool for a page that allows a user to select any text on the page and click a button. This click then formats the selected text with a yellow background. I can make this work inside of a single tag, but if the range of selection is across multiple tags (for instance, the first LI in an unordered list along with half of the second), I have difficulty applying the style. I can't just wrap the selection with a span here unfortunately.
Basically, I want the effects associated with contentEditable
and execCommand
without actually making anything editable on the page except to apply a background color to the selected text with the click of a button.
I'm open to jQuery solutions, and found this plug-in that seems to simplify the ability to create ranges across browsers, but I was unable to use it to apply any formatting to the selected range. I can see from the console that it's picking up on the selection, but using something like:
var selected = $().selectedText();
$(selected).css("background-color","yellow");
has no effect.
Any help pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
The following should do what you want. In non-IE browsers it turns on designMode
, applies a background colour and then switches designMode
off again.
UPDATE
Fixed to work in IE 9.
function makeEditableAndHighlight(colour) {
sel = window.getSelection();
if (sel.rangeCount && sel.getRangeAt) {
range = sel.getRangeAt(0);
}
document.designMode = "on";
if (range) {
sel.removeAllRanges();
sel.addRange(range);
}
// Use HiliteColor since some browsers apply BackColor to the whole block
if (!document.execCommand("HiliteColor", false, colour)) {
document.execCommand("BackColor", false, colour);
}
document.designMode = "off";
}
function highlight(colour) {
var range, sel;
if (window.getSelection) {
// IE9 and non-IE
try {
if (!document.execCommand("BackColor", false, colour)) {
makeEditableAndHighlight(colour);
}
} catch (ex) {
makeEditableAndHighlight(colour)
}
} else if (document.selection && document.selection.createRange) {
// IE <= 8 case
range = document.selection.createRange();
range.execCommand("BackColor", false, colour);
}
}
As far as I know, you won't be able to apply styling to regular text. You some sort of html element to operate on. You could try wrapping the selected text with a span and then style the span.
$().selectedText().wrap("<span></span>").parent().addClass("wrapped").css({backgroundColor: "Yellow"});
I added a class of "wrapped" as well, so that on subsequent attempts to highlight text, you can remove previous highlights.
$(".wrapped").each(function(){ ($(this).replaceWith( $(this).text() });
Code is untested.