Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Feb
11
Written by:
2/11/2009
The folks working on jQuery have really done a fantastic job of making the lives of developers across the globe earier. But they do not need me to tell them that. :)
I am so happy that the DotNetNuke Core Team decided to put jQuery support into the DNN Core. That has simplified and decreased UI development time for me exponentially. And it has made UI development more fun too! Moving on...
Here is the scenario that I ran into today. A website visitor enters a value into a textbox, or selects a value from an autocomplete implementation. No matter how much text is in the textbox, the novice web form user will not know how to quickly replace that text. They will simply click once in the textbox, and then use many keystroke of both the <Delete> and <Backspace> keys to remove the text before they enter in new text. This is not a favorable usability experience.
Here is how you might fix that: make the textbox automatically highlight or select all of the text in the textbox when the visitor clicks in it. The main problem has always been getting things like this to work in all browsers. Here is how you would implement this using jQuery.
Let's assume that we have the following text input:
<input type="text" id="txtInput" />
In most cases, we would want to have this feature available to all textboxes across our website, so we would create a function to handle this, and call it as needed. Calling this function with the expected argument will make execute the highlighting of the text.
function selectAllText(textbox) {
textbox.focus();
textbox.select();
}Assuming you are developing against DotNetNuke 5, or have jQuery already imported into your website, add the following jQuery to your site for each textbox. (If you have a lot of textboxes, we could do this differently, but that's for a different post.)
jQuery('#txtInput').click(function() { selectAllText(jQuery(this)) });Now, when you run the code, you will end up with a working textbox, like the example below.
Technorati Tags:
DNN, DotNetNuke, DNN Blog, jQuery, 5.00.00
Copyright ©2009 Will Strohl
19 comment(s) so far...
Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Why not apply this functionality application wide?
jQuery(':text').click(function() {
textbox.focus();
textbox.select();
});
Do you see think the function selectAllText(textbox) could be reused somewhere?
By Dejan on
2/12/2009
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Yes. That is the statement made preceding the jQuery example.
In many cases, we wouldn't want every single textbox on the website to have this feature enabled. This is especially true if the site is making use of any highly specialized 3rd party controls. Their functionality would break. This example assumes that you do indeed want to reuse the function for specific textbox inputs.
By Will on
2/12/2009
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
it seems the code is broken in internet explorer 6.0
By razvan on
12/30/2009
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
That's interesting, because the select() method is not specific to jQuery, as it is also a root method in JavaScript. I would suspect that there's something else preventing your select() method from executing properly.
By Will on
12/30/2009
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Howzit Will,
I enjoy reading your posts. Great blog. Please could you assist me. I have been working with DNN for over a year now but just got into jquery recently. My jquery module works however how do i go about implementing it into DNN 5??? I really am struggling. Getting lost with some of the tutorials i have read. Some links would be great or if you could provide me with a step by step way to implement it.
Thanks very much.
By juan on
4/12/2010
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Using jQuery in DNN modules is actually quite easy. Here is a blog post to get you started.
jQuery Tips for DotNetNuke Developers
By Will on
4/12/2010
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Best to use focusin() instead of click(), so you can still select a part of the line you are editing in.
By Kriekkop on
6/1/2010
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
I haven't tried your suggestion, but mine works just fine in all popular browsers. Thanks for the tip though. :)
By Will on
6/1/2010
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
The above demo I have observed few issues While selecting the text It is highlighting the text value after move out text entry then automatically UnHighlighting the text box value. This issue happened only on Chorme and Safari. It is working fine for IE and Firefox So, Could you tell me..how to resolve.
By Mani on
6/23/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
@Mani: Sounds like there might be competing scripts changing the intended behavior.
By Will on
6/27/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Mani is right. I notice the same behavior right here on this page in Chrome. If I want to use the mouse to select part of the text, I can't, because the whole thing gets selected as soon as I let up the mouse button.
By Kyralessa on
6/29/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
@Kyralessa & Mani: Oh... I misunderstood. This is an intended side-effect for this example.
By Will on
6/29/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Using focusin instead does seem to obviate the problem. The full text is selected if you tab into or click the textbox, but it's still possible to select text with the mouse if the focus is in the textbox already. (Using click instead of focusin, the selectall behavior happens every time you click in the textbox, so it's not possible to select text unless you want all of it.)
By Kyralessa on
6/30/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
@Kyralessa: I completely agree. However, that was not the use case I was trying to solve with this example. :)
By Will on
6/30/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Sure it's possible to select a portion of the text..
All you do is:
Click the textbox, which highlights all of the text,
Click again, which unhighlights the text,
Select the text you want and make sure you hit Ctrl+C BEFORE let go of the mouse button
Sure, this isn't ideal and most users probably wouldn't do it or probably even know how to, but it's certainly possible.
Dan
By Dan on
7/9/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Is there any way to select the text without clicking the textbox?
Like what i want is a button which says "Select All" and when i click on it all the text in a textarea gets selected.
By Ankur S. on
11/24/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
@Ankur: You need to be able to do it based upon an event of some kind if it's not the click of the textbox. All you do is move that logic to the event you desire.
By Will on
11/30/2011
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
Hello,
It looks like a good solution, but for some reason it does not work on my Blog. I am using WordPress and I tried to add script in header, also I tried to add script below the line in the post content like it is added on this page....
When I click on the text I placed under value="" text disappear, just like when I create normal "input text" field with "value" (eg. "Your name"), text which, in this case, should disappear and allow visitor to fill up details.
But when I type some text in that field manually on frontend, then it turned out that it works... When I click on text, whole text is selected.
Maybe I am not using it right. I already have jquery loaded in header for other purposes.
Thanks
By kele on
1/16/2012
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Re: Using jQuery to Highlight (Select) All Text in a Textbox
@Kele: Sounds like you may have multiple jQuery references in your page. Make sure there's only one. Also, use a tool like Firebug to ensure that only one event is bound to that textbox.
By Will on
1/18/2012
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