EditContext: text 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 text read-only property of the EditContext interface represents the editable content of the element.

Value

A string containing the current editable content of the element that's attached to the EditContext object. Its initial value is the empty string.

This string may or may not be equal to the value of the textContent property of the DOM element that's associated to the EditContext. The associated element might, for example, be a <canvas> element, which doesn't have a textContent property. Or, the associated element might be a <div> element that contains text that's different than the EditContext.text value, for more advanced rendering.

The text property of the EditContext object can be used as the model for the editable text region. Other properties of the EditContext object, such as selectionStart and selectionEnd refer to offsets within the text string.

Examples

Using text to render the text in an editable canvas

In the following example, the EditContext API is used to render the text a user enters in a <canvas> element.

html
<canvas id="editor-canvas"></canvas>
js
const canvas = document.getElementById("editor-canvas");
const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
const editContext = new EditContext();
canvas.editContext = editContext;

editContext.addEventListener("textupdate", (e) => {
  // When the user has focus on the <canvas> and enters text,
  // this event is fired, and we use it to re-render the text.
  console.log(
    `The user entered the text: ${e.text}. Re-rendering the full EditContext text`,
  );
  ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
  ctx.fillText(editContext.text, 10, 10);
});

Specifications

Specification
EditContext API
# dom-editcontext-text

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
text
Experimental

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support
No support
No support
Experimental. Expect behavior to change in the future.