Getting the index position of a textarea selection.

[hmichaels]

Hi all,

I'm really struggling to find any sample code for getting the start and end position of a text area selection (i.e. a textarea contains the phrase "Why isn't there a standard, well-known function that does this?" and somebody selects the word "there" -- using a function, I'd like to be able to grab the start position and end position of the word "there").

Can anybody help me with this, or am I going to have to hack together some long-winded function to do this seemingly simple task?

Thanks in advance.

[cyber1]

Heres a snippet of code:

 var txtarea = document.editform.wikitext;
if(txtarea.selectionStart || txtarea.selectionStart == '0') {
 var replaced = false;
 var startPos = txtarea.selectionStart;
 var endPos   = txtarea.selectionEnd;
    if(endPos - startPos) replaced = true;
 var scrollTop=txtarea.scrollTop;
 var myText = (txtarea.value).substring(startPos, endPos);
if(myText.charAt(myText.length - 1) == " "){ // exclude ending space char, if any
      subst = tagOpen + myText.substring(0, (myText.length - 1)) + tagClose + " ";
   } else {
  myText = myText.replace(/link:/g,'');

      subst =  '<a href="'+sponsurl+'">'+myText+'</a>';
      
    }
    txtarea.value = txtarea.value.substring(0, startPos) + subst +
                    txtarea.value.substring(endPos, txtarea.value.length);