Baseline Widely available
The selectionStart
property of the HTMLTextAreaElement
interface specifies the start position of the current text selection in a <textarea>
element. It is a number representing the beginning index of the selected text. It can be used to both retrieve and set the start of the index of the beginning of a <textarea>
s selected text.
When nothing is selected, the value of both the selectionStart
and selectionEnd
is the position of the cursor (caret) inside the <textarea>
element.
Setting selectionStart
to a value greater then the current value of selectionEnd
updates both the selectionStart
and selectionEnd
properties to that value. If that value is equal to or greater than the textLength
, both properties are both set to the textLength
property value.
The property value can be retrieved and set without the <textarea>
having focus, but the element does need to have focus for the ::selection
pseudo-element to match the selected text.
Setting the selectionStart
to a new value fires the selectchange
and select
events.
A non-negative number.
Examplesconst textarea = document.getElementById("text-box");
const start = textarea.selectionStart;
Specifications Browser compatibility See also
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4