HTMLTextAreaElement: selectionDirection property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The selectionDirection property of the HTMLTextAreaElement interface specifies the current direction of the selection. The possible values are "forward", "backward", and "none". The forward value indicates the selection was performed in the start-to-end direction of the current locale, with backward indicating the opposite direction. The none value occurs if the direction is unknown. It can be used to both retrieve and change the direction of the <textarea>s selected text.

Setting the selectionDirection to a new value fires the selectchange and select events.

Value

A string; "forward", "backward", or "none".

Examples

js
const textarea = document.getElementById("text-box");
const end = textarea.selectionDirection;

Specifications

Specification
HTML
# dom-textarea/input-selectiondirection

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
selectionDirection

Legend

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Full support
Full support

See also