Display current line and column number for a textarea.

Question

I'm making a file edit interface in my web-app, I have a textarea with file contents.

When textarea is focused, I want to output the position of the cursor, i.e. line number and column: this is useful because error messages usually yield a line number, for example.

The question is: how do I figure out the position of the cursor in textarea? I'm using prototype library. Maybe there's a solution already?

I'm not really interested in fancy toolbars for the textarea, which are offered by those advanced widgets.

Answer 1

You may want to check out these 2 links:

http://www.dedestruct.com/2008/03/22/howto-cross-browser-cursor-position-in-textareas/ https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM:Selection

..once you have a selection (cursor index in text), you can split your text by newlines, thus getting line number. you can get column by determining index from beginning of a line