I am about to implement Facebook like in integration in my contenteditable div where if i give '$' and some character like 'a' i need a auto-suggestion which should pop up near my caret position.
I need to know how to find out the last character before caret position either in JavaScript for IE and Other browsers. I have access to the Jquery library.
(function($) {
$.fn.getCursorPosition = function() {
var input = this.get(0);
if (!input) return; // No (input) element found
if ('selectionStart' in input) {
// Standard-compliant browsers
return input.selectionStart;
} else if (document.selection) {
// IE
input.focus();
var sel = document.selection.createRange();
var selLen = document.selection.createRange().text.length;
sel.moveStart('character', -input.value.length);
return sel.text.length - selLen;
}
}
})(jQuery);
eg.
var caretPosition = $("#contenteditablediv").getCursorPosition();
var lastchar = getchar(caretposition -1);???
Here's an example of how to do this. It creates a range that starts at the start of the editable element and ends immediately before the caret, gets the range's text and returns the last character of that range.
Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/MH5xX/
function getCharacterPrecedingCaret(containerEl) {
var precedingChar = "", sel, range, precedingRange;
if (window.getSelection) {
sel = window.getSelection();
if (sel.rangeCount > 0) {
range = sel.getRangeAt(0).cloneRange();
range.collapse(true);
range.setStart(containerEl, 0);
precedingChar = range.toString().slice(-1);
}
} else if ( (sel = document.selection) && sel.type != "Control") {
range = sel.createRange();
precedingRange = range.duplicate();
precedingRange.moveToElementText(containerEl);
precedingRange.setEndPoint("EndToStart", range);
precedingChar = precedingRange.text.slice(-1);
}
return precedingChar;
}
var editableEl = document.getElementById("editable");
var precedingCharEl = document.getElementById("precedingChar");
function reportCharacterPrecedingCaret() {
precedingCharEl.innerHTML = "Character preceding caret: " + getCharacterPrecedingCaret(editableEl);
}
editableEl.onmouseup = editableEl.onkeyup = reportCharacterPrecedingCaret;
<div contenteditable="true" id="editable">Here is some text. Please put the caret somewhere in here.</div>
<div id="precedingChar" style="font-weight: bold"></div>