I already have this working in Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

I would like to be able to programmatically set the position of the text cursor within an INPUT field in Internet Explorer.

I looked this topic up on various websites and generally found the same technique:

var el = document.getElementById("myTextField");
var pos = 6;

if (document.selection) {
    el.focus();
    var selection = document.selection.createRange();
    selection.moveStart("character", -el.value.length);
    selection.moveStart("character", pos);
    selection.moveEnd("character", 0);
    selection.select();
}

The problem is that when I try to do this the cursor always goes to the end of the value regardless of what position I provide.

Did I misunderstand the technique people have been using? Did I miss something somewhere? It's a little bit frustrating, but of course that's the nature of web development with these different browsers.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I already have this working in Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

I would like to be able to programmatically set the position of the text cursor within an INPUT field in Internet Explorer.

I looked this topic up on various websites and generally found the same technique:

var el = document.getElementById("myTextField");
var pos = 6;

if (document.selection) {
    el.focus();
    var selection = document.selection.createRange();
    selection.moveStart("character", -el.value.length);
    selection.moveStart("character", pos);
    selection.moveEnd("character", 0);
    selection.select();
}

The problem is that when I try to do this the cursor always goes to the end of the value regardless of what position I provide.

Did I misunderstand the technique people have been using? Did I miss something somewhere? It's a little bit frustrating, but of course that's the nature of web development with these different browsers.

Thanks in advance for any help.

• javascript
• internet-explorer
• selection
• textinput
• text-cursor

• which version of IE are you testing in, from what I've found this script is for IE6 and hasn't been tested in later versions. – Greg Guida Commented Jul 25, 2011 at 21:25
• What versions of IE do you need to support? Looks like they are pickier about acceptable formats. See Quirks patibility chart - quirksmode/dom/range_intro.html – mrtsherman Commented Jul 25, 2011 at 21:29
• I have been testing in Internet Explorer 7 & 8. Internet Explorer 9 seems to work fine with the code that I use to handle Firefox. – natlee75 Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 2:39

1 Answer 1

The following code is working for me in IE 9

<script type="text/javascript">
    var input = document.getElementById("myInput");
    input.selectionStart = 2;
    input.selectionEnd = 5;
</script>

Here is the code that I'm using for IE 6

      input.select();
        var sel = document.selection.createRange();
        sel.collapse();
        sel.moveStart('character', this.SelectionStart);
        sel.collapse();
        sel.moveEnd('character', this.SelectionEnd - this.SelectionStart);
        sel.select();