javascript get selected html elements

Question

User is on a webpage , uses his mouse to select stuff, how can i use javascript to know what has been selected?

Answer 1

If you're talking about the user dragging his mouse over text so that it's highlighted, use the Selection and Range objects (for Mozilla) and Selection and TextRange objects (for IE).

Answer 2

To get the raw text currently highlighted on the page you can do something like this:

function getSelectedText() {
    return window.getSelection ? window.getSelection() 
                               : document.selection.createRange().text;
}

Check an example of the above code here.

More info:

• DOM Selection
• IE document.selection