determining selected text

craigm

Hi,
I'm trying to build a little editor for my clients to use so that they can update the pages themselves.

I've set up a text area so that they can add text, that works great. But I'd like them to be able to add bold tags and the like without knowing HTML.

So.... I'd like them to be able to select some of their text and click a "bold" button to add the tags. I can handle adding the tags (I think), but I don't know of any way to find out what text they've selected.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Craig

horndog

find a WYSIWYG editor. My company sells one. Its great for content management. Its all javascript based, plus all the data that is created is stored into a mysql database.

You can buy it off of us, or if you like to do it yourself, then look for content managers on the web

craigm

Thanks for the advice. I don't really want to confuse my clients and provide support for a full featured wysiwyg though. I just want a few simple options.

Also I'd actually would like to know the code for getting the current text selection.

It sounds like Javascript can do it from your reply. Maybe I'll do some snooping with that if no one suggests a way to do it in PHP.

dalecosp

Just for my own curiosity's sake, I've been reading the source for a forum system much like this one.

It's a heck of a lot of code...so far, I've been able to determine that the PHP scripts are aware of the highlights, and are using ereg_ or preg_replace to display highlighted text, but I haven't yet figured out what's doing the highlighting. It sure seems like it might be a JavaScript thing...but who knows? Certainly the highlighting itself is the browser....

Maybe the manual....

dalecosp

This wasn't too hard to find on Google:

http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum2/HTML/001759.html

He's using JavaScript, and this guy has a problem, but it might get you started.

Myself, I think I'm just going to have the type in a <br> now and then, for right now.

Another alternative would be some kind of open-source CMS, I guess...

Are we reinventing the wheel?

dalecosp

craigm

The javascript selection object in IE seems like the perfect tool. Too bad it only works on the PC versions of IE.

I'm on a Mac and some of my clients probably will be too. 🙁

For those interested I found a nice tutorial here.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/12/21/js_toolbar.html