EditContext: selectionStart property

Limited availability

This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.

Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.

The selectionStart read-only property of the EditContext refers to the offset, within the editable text content, of the start of the current selection.

Value

A Number

Examples

Using `selectionStart` to render the user selection in an editable canvas

This example shows how to use the selectionStart and selectionEnd properties to draw the current selection in a <canvas> element that's associated to an EditContext.

html

<canvas id="editor-canvas"></canvas>

const ANCHOR_X = 10;
const ANCHOR_Y = 30;
const FONT_SIZE = 20;

const canvas = document.getElementById("editor-canvas");
const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.font = `${FONT_SIZE}px Arial`;

const editContext = new EditContext({
  text: "Hello world!",
  selectionStart: 6,
  selectionEnd: 11,
});
canvas.editContext = editContext;

function render() {
  ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

  // Render the entire text content first.
  ctx.fillStyle = "black";
  ctx.fillText(editContext.text, ANCHOR_X, ANCHOR_Y);

  // Get the width from the start of the text to the start of the selection.
  const selectionStartX = ctx.measureText(
    editContext.text.substring(0, editContext.selectionStart),
  );

  // Get the width of the selection.
  const selectionWidth = ctx.measureText(
    editContext.text.substring(
      editContext.selectionStart,
      editContext.selectionEnd,
    ),
  );

  // Draw a rectangle on top of the text to represent the selection.
  ctx.fillStyle = "blue";
  ctx.fillRect(
    selectionStartX.width + ANCHOR_X,
    ANCHOR_Y - FONT_SIZE,
    selectionWidth.width,
    FONT_SIZE,
  );

  // Re-render just the selected text in white, over the rectangle.
  ctx.fillStyle = "white";
  ctx.fillText(
    editContext.text.substring(
      editContext.selectionStart,
      editContext.selectionEnd,
    ),
    selectionStartX.width + ANCHOR_X,
    ANCHOR_Y,
  );
}

render();

Specifications

Specification
EditContext API # dom-editcontextinit-selectionstart

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser