Set keyboard caret position in html textbox

Question

Does anybody know how to move the keyboard caret in a textbox to a particular position?

For example, if a text-box (e.g. input element, not text-area) has 50 characters in it and I want to position the caret before character 20, how would I go about it?

This is in differentiation from this question: jQuery Set Cursor Position in Text Area , which requires jQuery.

Answer 1

function SetCaretEnd(tID) {
    tID += "";
    if (!tID.startsWith("#")) { tID = "#" + tID; }
    $(tID).focus();
    var t = $(tID).val();
    if (t.length == 0) { return; }
    $(tID).val("");
    $(tID).val(t);
    $(tID).scrollTop($(tID)[0].scrollHeight); }

Answer 2

I've adjusted the answer of kd7 a little bit because elem.selectionStart will evaluate to false when the selectionStart is incidentally 0.

function setCaretPosition(elem, caretPos) {
    var range;

    if (elem.createTextRange) {
        range = elem.createTextRange();
        range.move('character', caretPos);
        range.select();
    } else {
        elem.focus();
        if (elem.selectionStart !== undefined) {
            elem.setSelectionRange(caretPos, caretPos);
        }
    }
}