EditContext: selectionEnd 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 selectionEnd read-only property of the EditContext refers to the offset, within the editable text content, of the end of the current selection.

Value

Examples

Using selectionEnd to render the user selection in an editable canvas

This example shows how to use the selectionStart and selectionEnd properties to draw the current selection in a <canvas> element that's associated to an EditContext.

html
<canvas id="editor-canvas"></canvas>
js
const ANCHOR_X = 10;
const ANCHOR_Y = 30;
const FONT_SIZE = 20;

const canvas = document.getElementById("editor-canvas");
const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.font = `${FONT_SIZE}px Arial`;

const editContext = new EditContext({
  text: "Hello world!",
  selectionStart: 6,
  selectionEnd: 11,
});
canvas.editContext = editContext;

function render() {
  ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

  // Render the entire text content first.
  ctx.fillStyle = "black";
  ctx.fillText(editContext.text, ANCHOR_X, ANCHOR_Y);

  // Get the width from the start of the text to the start of the selection.
  const selectionStartX = ctx.measureText(
    editContext.text.substring(0, editContext.selectionStart),
  );

  // Get the width of the selection.
  const selectionWidth = ctx.measureText(
    editContext.text.substring(
      editContext.selectionStart,
      editContext.selectionEnd,
    ),
  );

  // Draw a rectangle on top of the text to represent the selection.
  ctx.fillStyle = "blue";
  ctx.fillRect(
    selectionStartX.width + ANCHOR_X,
    ANCHOR_Y - FONT_SIZE,
    selectionWidth.width,
    FONT_SIZE,
  );

  // Re-render just the selected text in white, over the rectangle.
  ctx.fillStyle = "white";
  ctx.fillText(
    editContext.text.substring(
      editContext.selectionStart,
      editContext.selectionEnd,
    ),
    selectionStartX.width + ANCHOR_X,
    ANCHOR_Y,
  );
}

render();

Specifications

Specification
EditContext API
# dom-editcontextinit-selectionend

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser