Is it possible to select all the text an an element (e.g., a paragraph <p>
) with JavaScript? A lot of people think jQuery .select()
would do this, but it does not. It merely triggers an event. Note that DOM objects for <input>
elements have a native select()
method, but most other elements (such as <output>
and <p>
) do not.
(Do I need to use content-editable
to get this to work?)
If you need to support later browsers, i.e., IE9+, you can use the following
document.querySelector('button').addEventListener('click', function(){
var range = document.createRange();
var selection = window.getSelection();
range.selectNodeContents(document.querySelector('p'));
selection.removeAllRanges();
selection.addRange(range);
});
Hello <p>Select me</p> World
<button id ='btn'>Select text</button>
Related links:
For support across all browsers, see https://github.com/timdown/rangy from https://stackoverflow.com/users/96100/tim-down