Okay, I've been looking all over the web to find a solution but I couldn't find one, is there a way to get the word before the caret position in an editable div so a bit like:
This is some| demo texts
This should return the word "some"... I don't know if this is possible, I would be glad for any help, thanks :).
With using Caret Position finder method provided here this will do what you want.
function ReturnWord(text, caretPos) {
var index = text.indexOf(caretPos);
var preText = text.substring(0, caretPos);
if (preText.indexOf(" ") > 0) {
var words = preText.split(" ");
return words[words.length - 1]; //return last word
}
else {
return preText;
}
}
function AlertPrevWord() {
var text = document.getElementById("textArea");
var caretPos = GetCaretPosition(text)
var word = ReturnWord(text.value, caretPos);
if (word != null) {
alert(word);
}
}
function GetCaretPosition(ctrl) {
var CaretPos = 0; // IE Support
if (document.selection) {
ctrl.focus();
var Sel = document.selection.createRange();
Sel.moveStart('character', -ctrl.value.length);
CaretPos = Sel.text.length;
}
// Firefox support
else if (ctrl.selectionStart || ctrl.selectionStart == '0')
CaretPos = ctrl.selectionStart;
return (CaretPos);
}
<input id="textArea" type="text" />
<br />
<input id="Submit" type="submit" value="Test" onclick="AlertPrevWord()" />
Here is also a jsfiddle.
Here is a rough method using the Selection
and Range
objects.
function getWord() {
var range = window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0);
if (range.collapsed) {
text = range.startContainer.textContent.substring(0, range.startOffset+1);
return text.split(/\b/g).pop();
}
return '';
}
You can see it in action here: http://jsfiddle.net/ggfFw/1/.
This will not work in IE. If you need IE support look at the Rangy library.
I had something like that https://stackoverflow.com/a/9960262/986160 yet at some point it wasn't getting a selection in my Chrome browser. Based on my other answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26728677/986160 - I changed it accordingly to be:
function getLastWordBeforeCaret() {
const containerEl = document.getElementById('element-id');
let preceding = '';
let sel;
let range;
if (window.getSelection) {
sel = window.getSelection();
if (sel && sel.rangeCount > 0) {
range = sel.getRangeAt(0).cloneRange();
range.collapse(true);
range.setStart(containerEl, 0);
preceding = range.toString();
}
}
let queryMatch = preceding.match(/([^\s]+)$/i);
if (queryMatch) {
return queryMatch[1];
} else {
return '';
}
}