Selection: type property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2017.

The type read-only property of the Selection interface returns a string describing the type of the current selection.

Value

A string describing the type of the current selection. Possible values are:

None

No selection has currently been made.

Caret

The selection is collapsed (i.e. the caret is placed on some text, but no range has been selected).

Range

A range has been selected.

Examples

In this example, the event handler will fire each time a new selection is made. console.log(selection.type) will return Caret or Range depending on whether the caret is placed at a single point in the text, or a range has been selected.

js
let selection;

document.onselectionchange = () => {
  console.log("New selection made");
  selection = document.getSelection();
  console.log(selection.type);
};

Specifications

Specification
Selection API
# dom-selection-type

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
type

Legend

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

Full support
Full support

See also