I'm trying to get all the DOM nodes that are within a range object, what's the best way to do this?
var selection = window.getSelection(); //what the user has selected
var range = selection.getRangeAt(0); //the first range of the selection
var startNode = range.startContainer;
var endNode = range.endContainer;
var allNodes = /*insert magic*/;
I've been been thinking of a way for the last few hours and came up with this:
var getNextNode = function(node, skipChildren){
//if there are child nodes and we didn't come from a child node
if (node.firstChild && !skipChildren) {
return node.firstChild;
}
if (!node.parentNode){
return null;
}
return node.nextSibling
|| getNextNode(node.parentNode, true);
};
var getNodesInRange = function(range){
var startNode = range.startContainer.childNodes[range.startOffset]
|| range.startContainer;//it's a text node
var endNode = range.endContainer.childNodes[range.endOffset]
|| range.endContainer;
if (startNode == endNode && startNode.childNodes.length === 0) {
return [startNode];
};
var nodes = [];
do {
nodes.push(startNode);
}
while ((startNode = getNextNode(startNode))
&& (startNode != endNode));
return nodes;
};
However when the end node is the parent of the start node it returns everything on the page. I'm sure I'm overlooking something obvious? Or maybe going about it in totally the wrong way.
The Rangy library has a
Range.getNodes([Array nodeTypes[, Function filter]])
function.below code solve your problem
I made 2 additional fixes based on MikeB's answer to improve the accuracy of the selected nodes.
I'm particularly testing this on select all operations, other than range selection made by dragging the cursor along text spanning across multiple elements.
In Firefox, hitting select all (CMD+A) returns a range where it's startContainer & endContainer is the contenteditable div, the difference is in the startOffset & endOffset where it's respectively the index of the first and the last child node.
In Chrome, hitting select all (CMD+A) returns a range where it's startContainer is the first child node of the contenteditable div, and the endContainer is the last child node of the contenteditable div.
The modifications I've added work around the discrepancies between the two. You can see the comments in the code for additional explanation.
bob. the function only returns the startNode and endNode. the nodes in between do not get pushed to the array.
seems the while loop returns null on getNextNode() hence that block never gets executed.
The getNextNode will skip your desired endNode recursively if its a parent node.
Perform the conditional break check inside of the getNextNode instead:
and in while statement:
Here's an implementation I came up with to solve this: