Character offset in an Internet Explorer TextRange

Question

As far as I can tell there's no simple way of retrieving a character offset from a TextRange object in Internet Explorer. The W3C Range object has a node, and the offset into the text within that node. IE seems to just have pixel offsets. There are methods to create, extend and compare ranges, so it would be possible to write an algorithm to calculate the character offset, but I feel I must be missing something.

So, what's the easiest way to calculate the character offset of the start of an Internet Explorer TextRange?

Answer 1

I use a method based on this caret position trick:

// Assume r is a range:
var offsetFromBody = Math.abs( r.moveEnd('character', -1000000) );

Since moveEnd returns the number of characters actually moved, offset should now be the offset from the start of the document. This works fine for testing primitive caret movement, but for expanded selections and for getting the exact node that holds the range anchor you'll need something more complex:

// where paramter r is a range:
function getRangeOffsetIE( r ) {
  var end = Math.abs( r.duplicate().moveEnd('character', -1000000) );
  // find the anchor element's offset
  var range = r.duplicate();
  r.collapse( false );
  var parentElm = range.parentElement();
  var children = parentElm.getElementsByTagName('*');
  for (var i = children.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
    range.moveToElementText( children[i] );
    if ( range.inRange(r) ) {
      parentElm = children[i];
      break;
    }
  }
  range.moveToElementText( parentElm );
  return end - Math.abs( range.moveStart('character', -1000000) );
}

This should return the correct caret text offset. Of course, if you know the target node already, or are able to provide a context, then you can skip the whole looping search mess.