Highlight text range using JavaScript

Question

I would like to highlight (apply css to) a certain text range, denoted by its start and end position. This is more diffucult than it seems, since there may be other tags within the text, that need to be ignored.

Example:

<div>abcd<em>efg</em>hij</div>

highlight(2, 6) needs to highlight "cdef" without removing the tag.

I have tried already using a TextRange object, but without success.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You could take a look at how works this powerful JavaScript utility which support selection over multiple DOM elements:

MASHA (short for Mark & Share) allow you to mark interesting parts of web page content and share it

http://mashajs.com/index_eng.html

It's also on GitHub https://github.com/SmartTeleMax/MaSha

Works even on Mobile Safari and IE!

Answer 2

Following solution doesn't work for IE, you'll need to apply TextRange objects etc. for that. As this uses selections to perform this, it shouldn't break the HTML in normal cases, for example:

<div>abcd<span>efg</span>hij</div>

With highlight(3,6);

outputs:

<div>abc<em>d<span>ef</span></em><span>g</span>hij</div>

Take note how it wraps the first character outside of the span into an em, and then the rest within the span into a new one. Where as if it would just open it at character 3 and end at character 6, it would give invalid markup like:

<div>abc<em>d<span>ef</em>g</span>hij</div>

The code:

var r = document.createRange();
var s = window.getSelection()

r.selectNode($('div')[0]);
s.removeAllRanges();
s.addRange(r);

// not quite sure why firefox has problems with this
if ($.browser.webkit) {
    s.modify("move", "backward", "documentboundary");
}

function highlight(start,end){
    for(var st=0;st<start;st++){
        s.modify("move", "forward", "character");
    }

    for(var st=0;st<(end-start);st++){
        s.modify("extend", "forward", "character");
    }
}

highlight(2,6);

var ra = s.getRangeAt(0);
var newNode = document.createElement("em");
newNode.appendChild(ra.extractContents()); 
ra.insertNode(newNode);

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/niklasvh/4NDb9/

edit Looks like at least my FF4 had some issues with

s.modify("move", "backward", "documentboundary");

but at the same time, it seems to work without it, so I just changed it to

if ($.browser.webkit) {
        s.modify("move", "backward", "documentboundary");
}

edit as Tim Pointed out, modify is only available from FF4 onwards, so I took a different approach to getting the selection, which doesn't need the modify method, in hopes in making it a bit more browser compatible (IE still needs its own solution).

The code:

var r = document.createRange();
var s = window.getSelection()

var pos = 0;

function dig(el){
    $(el).contents().each(function(i,e){
        if (e.nodeType==1){
            // not a textnode
         dig(e);   
        }else{
            if (pos<start){
               if (pos+e.length>=start){
                range.setStart(e, start-pos);
               }
            }

            if (pos<end){
               if (pos+e.length>=end){
                range.setEnd(e, end-pos);
               }
            }            

            pos = pos+e.length;
        }
    });  
}
var start,end, range;

function highlight(element,st,en){
    range = document.createRange();
    start = st;
    end = en;
    dig(element);
    s.addRange(range);

}
highlight($('div'),3,6);

var ra = s.getRangeAt(0);

var newNode = document.createElement("em");
newNode.appendChild(ra.extractContents()); 
ra.insertNode(newNode);

example: http://jsfiddle.net/niklasvh/4NDb9/

Answer 3

Based on the ideas of the jQuery.highlight plugin.

    private highlightRange(selector: JQuery, start: number, end: number): void {
        let cur = 0;
        let replacements: { node: Text; pos: number; len: number }[] = [];

        let dig = function (node: Node): void {
            if (node.nodeType === 3) {
                let nodeLen = (node as Text).data.length;
                let next = cur + nodeLen;
                if (next > start && cur < end) {
                    let pos = cur >= start ? cur : start;
                    let len = (next < end ? next : end) - pos;
                    if (len > 0) {
                        if (!(pos === cur && len === nodeLen && node.parentNode &&
                            node.parentNode.childNodes && node.parentNode.childNodes.length === 1 &&
                            (node.parentNode as Element).tagName === 'SPAN' && (node.parentNode as Element).className === 'highlight1')) {

                            replacements.push({
                                node: node as Text,
                                pos: pos - cur,
                                len: len,
                            });
                        }
                    }
                }
                cur = next;
            }
            else if (node.nodeType === 1) {
                let childNodes = node.childNodes;
                if (childNodes && childNodes.length) {
                    for (let i = 0; i < childNodes.length; i++) {
                        dig(childNodes[i]);
                        if (cur >= end) {
                            break;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        };

        selector.each(function (index, element): void {
            dig(element);
        });

        for (let i = 0; i < replacements.length; i++) {
            let replacement = replacements[i];
            let highlight = document.createElement('span');
            highlight.className = 'highlight1';
            let wordNode = replacement.node.splitText(replacement.pos);
            wordNode.splitText(replacement.len);
            let wordClone = wordNode.cloneNode(true);
            highlight.appendChild(wordClone);
            wordNode.parentNode.replaceChild(highlight, wordNode);
        }
    }

Answer 4

Below is a function to set the selection to a pair of character offsets within a particular element. This is naive implementation: it does not take into account any text that may be made invisible (either by CSS or by being inside a <script> or <style> element, for example) and may have browser discrepancies (IE versus everything else) with line breaks, and takes no account of collapsed whitespace (such as 2 or more consecutive space characters collapsing to one visible space on the page). However, it does work for your example in all major browsers.

For the other part, the highlighting, I'd suggest using document.execCommand() for that. You can use my function below to set the selection and then call document.execCommand(). You'll need to make the document temporarily editable in non-IE browsers for the command to work. See my answer here for code: getSelection & surroundContents across multiple tags

Here's a jsFiddle example showing the whole thing, working in all major browsers: http://jsfiddle.net/8mdX4/1211/

And the selection setting code:

function getTextNodesIn(node) {
    var textNodes = [];
    if (node.nodeType == 3) {
        textNodes.push(node);
    } else {
        var children = node.childNodes;
        for (var i = 0, len = children.length; i < len; ++i) {
            textNodes.push.apply(textNodes, getTextNodesIn(children[i]));
        }
    }
    return textNodes;
}

function setSelectionRange(el, start, end) {
    if (document.createRange && window.getSelection) {
        var range = document.createRange();
        range.selectNodeContents(el);
        var textNodes = getTextNodesIn(el);
        var foundStart = false;
        var charCount = 0, endCharCount;

        for (var i = 0, textNode; textNode = textNodes[i++]; ) {
            endCharCount = charCount + textNode.length;
            if (!foundStart && start >= charCount
                    && (start < endCharCount ||
                    (start == endCharCount && i <= textNodes.length))) {
                range.setStart(textNode, start - charCount);
                foundStart = true;
            }
            if (foundStart && end <= endCharCount) {
                range.setEnd(textNode, end - charCount);
                break;
            }
            charCount = endCharCount;
        }

        var sel = window.getSelection();
        sel.removeAllRanges();
        sel.addRange(range);
    } else if (document.selection && document.body.createTextRange) {
        var textRange = document.body.createTextRange();
        textRange.moveToElementText(el);
        textRange.collapse(true);
        textRange.moveEnd("character", end);
        textRange.moveStart("character", start);
        textRange.select();
    }
}