I would like to create a URL pointing to a web service I write, , together with an #-anchor that refers to a text selection on that page.

Is is possible in HTML/JS to create an anchor that refers to a Selection or a RangeObject?

I would like to create a URL pointing to a web service I write, http://mycoolthing.com, together with an #-anchor that refers to a text selection on that page.

Is is possible in HTML/JS to create an anchor that refers to a Selection or a RangeObject?

• javascript
• html
• text
• anchor
• selection

• 1 No quite sure what you mean by text selection. Do you mean a word or sentence in the middle of a bigger chuck of text? – cspete Commented Jan 15, 2015 at 14:56
• 2 If it's some specific text, you could wrap it in a span and assign an id to it, then the browser will scroll the page to the element that has the id specified in the # (although it will not select anything, but you could use a solution from stackoverflow.com/questions/985272/… to select the text) – Alvaro Montoro Commented Jan 15, 2015 at 15:20

5 Answers 5

All major browsers now support Scroll To Text Fragment

https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096#:~:text=This%20feature%20allows%20a%20user,and%20scrolls%20it%20into%20view.

As I mentioned in a comment, here is an option to select the text by using JavaScript and the hash (#) on the url.

It is divided in two parts:

1. The calling page will have a link to the target page (they can be the same) with a # indicating the text that you want to select (or if you know it, the ID of the element):

   <a href="myPage.html#Lorem">Link to my page with Lorem select</a>

2. The target page will have some JavaScript code that will select the text indicated in the # (if the hash is a valid element id, it will select the text within that element instead of the text).

*Notice that for this solution I used some code from Selecting text in an element (akin to highlighting with your mouse) (Kimtho6's solution)

/**
 * SelectText: function from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/985272/selecting-text-in-an-element-akin-to-highlighting-with-your-mouse (Kimtho6 solution)
 * 
 * element: string that contains an element id (without the #)
 */
function SelectText(element) {
    var doc = document;
    var text = doc.getElementById(element);    
    if (doc.body.createTextRange) { // ms
        var range = doc.body.createTextRange();
        range.moveToElementText(text);
        range.select();
    } else if (window.getSelection) {
        var selection = window.getSelection();
        var range = doc.createRange();
        range.selectNodeContents(text);
        selection.removeAllRanges();
        selection.addRange(range);

    }
}

/**
 * selectHashText: function that selects the first appearance of a text (or an element with the id) indicated in the location hash
 */
function selectHashText() {

    // check if there's an element with that ID
    if ($(document.location.hash).length == 0) {

        // select some text in the page
        var textToSelect = document.location.hash.substring(1);

        // if it's not an empty hash
        if (textToSelect != "") {

            // iterate the different elements in the body
            $("body *").each(function() {

                // if one contains the desired text
                if ($(this).text().indexOf(textToSelect) >= 0) {

                    // wrap the text in a span with a specific ID
                    $(this).html(
                        $(this).html().replace(textToSelect, "<span id='mySelect'>" + textToSelect + "</span>")
                    );

                    // select the text in the specific ID and stop iteration
                    SelectText("mySelect");
                }
            });
        }

    } else {
        // select the content of the id in the page
        SelectText(document.location.hash.substring(1));
    }
}

// execute the text selection on page load and every time the hash changes
$(window).on("hashchange", selectHashText);
$(document).ready(function() { selectHashText(); });

I created this jsfiddle, but it doesn't take the # so it doesn't help much. You can also see it on this web page. Notice that is the same code as in the jsfiddle (and above), just on one page.

UPDATE: (Elaborated from the comments below)

Without using the hash, you can pass the text that you want to select as a parameter in the GET or POST (I will use GET for simplicity):

<a href="myPage?select=Lorem">Select Lorem</a>

Then using your back-end language (I used PHP, you could use any other or even JavaScript parsing the location href), save the text into the textToSelect variable that I used before. As a last step, replace the .text() for .html() that I used (so the tags are included in the search too)

/**
 * gup: function from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/979975/how-to-get-the-value-from-the-url-parameter (Haim Evgi's solution)
 * 
 * name: string that contains the name of the parameter to return
 */
function gup( name ) {
    name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
    var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
    var regex = new RegExp( regexS );
    var results = regex.exec( window.location.href );
    return results == null ? null : results[1];
}

/**
 * selectHashText: function that selects the first appearance of a text (or an element with the id) indicated in the "select" parameter
 */
function selectTextAcross() {

    // get the "select" parameter from the URL
    var textToSelect = decodeURIComponent(gup("select"));

    // if it's not an empty hash
    if (textToSelect != "") {

        // iterate the different elements in the body
        $("body *").each(function() {

            // if one contains the desired text
            if ($(this).html().indexOf(textToSelect) >= 0) {

                // wrap the text in a span with a specific ID
                $(this).html(
                    $(this).html().replace(textToSelect, "<span id='mySelect'>" + textToSelect + "</span>")
                );

                // select the text in the specific ID and stop iteration
                SelectText("mySelect");
            }
        });
    } 
}

$(document).ready(function() { selectTextAcross(); });

You can see it working on this web page.

About this solution:

• It works (hey! better than nothing! :P)
• You can include html tags (you cannot with the # one)
• You need to know the document's source
• The generated code may not be valid and then the result may not be the expected one (all the browsers I tested with, they stop selecting after the first "crossed" tag)

According to this site, you can use javascript in order to find some text in the page.

http://www.javascripter.net/faq/searchin.htm

Perhaps you can create a link to the site and include the text selection with GET or POST so when the other page is loaded, you can go to the text selection using javascript and the information from the previous page.

Something like this in the first page:

window.location.href="url?text=textToFind"

And in the other page:

$(function () {
window.find(window.location.search)
});

Look at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/document.execCommand

createLink

Creates an anchor link from the selection, only if there is a selection. This requires the HREF URI string to be passed in as a value argument. The URI must contain at least a single character, which may be a white space. (Internet Explorer will create a link with a null URI value.)

like

document.execCommand('createLink', false, 'http://google.com');

You can get the selected (highlighted) text with

var txt = window.getSelection().toString();

and then build an anchor using that value

href="abc.html#' + txt;