moving the cursor position inside textarea

[snehula]

Hi there,

I was looking for a way to move the cursor position within a textarea by a given offset.
I have a button that inserts a timestamp and a \n at the beginning of the textarea (moving the rest of the text inside it a line lower), and am looking for a way to move the cursor behind the timestamp instead of behind the whole text so the user could start typing after inserting the timestamp right away instead of having to click or typing at the end of the text.
The timestamp length is constant so there is no need to find out where the desired position is I just haven't got a clue how to move the cursor there, looking for a javascript way to do this without jquery..

[snehula]

i was looking at createTextRange and move, moveStart, moveEnd, but all these used with select, which selects the given range. I don't want to select the text, I want to set the cursor position after the selected range, I just couldn't find how to do this anywhere..

[snehula]

ok apologies i found the solution, by just setting the setSelectionRange method's 2 parameters (start and end position) to the same location/number, respectively for non IE browsers doin something like
var range = obj.createTextRange();
range.collapse(true);
range.moveEnd('character', pos);
range.moveStart('character', pos);
range.select();

:-) communicating with myself..

[rocknbil]

Those are methods for IE only (if memory serves me right, it often doesn't . . . ) For Moz browsers you'll need to use selectionStart, selectionEnd, etc.

var allText = theField.value;
// IE
if (document.selection) {
var selectedText = document.selection;
// etc.
}
// NN/FF/Moz compat
else if ((theField.selectionStart) || (theField.selectionStart == 0)) {
var startPos = theField.selectionStart;
var endPos = theField.selectionEnd;
// etc.
}
else {alert('dynamic selection is not supported by your browser'); }

It definitely would be easier using jQuery and caret [plugins.jquery.com] :-)