I'm trying to use Javascript to replace the selected text in an arbitrary selected TEXTAREA node in Chrome (! not a content editable div !) The code fragment I see repeated in lots of places to replace selected text basically does this:
var sel = window.getSelection();
var range = sel.getRangeAt(0);
range.insertNode( document.createTextNode("test "));
However, this does not work for input fields such as TEXTAREA or INPUT TYPE=TEXT. The text is inserted BEFORE the TEXTAREA instead of inside it.
There is an alternative method to modify the selection text inside a text area using textarea.selectionStart and textarea.selectionEnd. However, these require figuring out which textarea element is actually active/selected. Chrome/Webkit document.activeElement seems to be broken and has been broken for a long time. I can't figure out any workaround to find the "currently selected textarea". See the bug here...
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=14436
You can see a micro-demo of the problem I'm trying to solve here.
http://dj1.willowmail.com/~jeske/_drop/insertIssue/1.html
http://ajaxandxml.blogspot.com/2007/11/emulating-activeelement-property-with.html
Any thoughts on this?
Given a webpage with an arbitrary bit of text selected in an arbitrary TEXTAREA node, without knowing ahead of time what textarea the focus is in, how do I find the active textarea and replace the selected text with some other text?
(( FYI: I'm using this code in a Chrome extension. An in-page javascript content script is extending the page javascript, so I have no idea what the page structure is ahead of time. It needs to work for any webpage. ))