Find out the 'line' (row) number of the cursor in a textarea
You would want to use selectionStart
to do this.
<textarea onkeyup="getLineNumber(this, document.getElementById('lineNo'));" onmouseup="this.onkeyup();"></textarea>
<div id="lineNo"></div>
<script>
function getLineNumber(textarea, indicator) {
indicator.innerHTML = textarea.value.substr(0, textarea.selectionStart).split("\n").length;
}
</script>
This works when you change the cursor position using the mouse as well.
This is tough because of word wrap. It's a very easy thing to count the number of line breaks present, but what happens when the new row is because of word wrap? To solve this problem, it's useful to create a mirror (credit: github.com/jevin). Here's the idea:
- Create a mirror of the textarea
- Send the content from the beginning of the textarea to the cursor to the mirror
- Use the height of the mirror to extract the current row
On JSFiddle
jQuery.fn.trackRows = function() {
return this.each(function() {
var ininitalHeight, currentRow, firstIteration = true;
var createMirror = function(textarea) {
jQuery(textarea).after('<div class="autogrow-textarea-mirror"></div>');
return jQuery(textarea).next('.autogrow-textarea-mirror')[0];
}
var sendContentToMirror = function (textarea) {
mirror.innerHTML = String(textarea.value.substring(0,textarea.selectionStart-1)).replace(/&/g, '&').replace(/"/g, '"').replace(/'/g, ''').replace(/</g, '<').replace(/>/g, '>').replace(/\n/g, '<br />') + '.<br/>.';
calculateRowNumber();
}
var growTextarea = function () {
sendContentToMirror(this);
}
var calculateRowNumber = function () {
if(firstIteration){
ininitalHeight = $(mirror).height();
currentHeight = ininitalHeight;
firstIteration = false;
} else {
currentHeight = $(mirror).height();
}
// Assume that textarea.rows = 2 initially
currentRow = currentHeight/(ininitalHeight/2) - 1;
//remove tracker in production
$('.tracker').html('Current row: ' + currentRow);
}
// Create a mirror
var mirror = createMirror(this);
// Style the mirror
mirror.style.display = 'none';
mirror.style.wordWrap = 'break-word';
mirror.style.whiteSpace = 'normal';
mirror.style.padding = jQuery(this).css('padding');
mirror.style.width = jQuery(this).css('width');
mirror.style.fontFamily = jQuery(this).css('font-family');
mirror.style.fontSize = jQuery(this).css('font-size');
mirror.style.lineHeight = jQuery(this).css('line-height');
// Style the textarea
this.style.overflow = "hidden";
this.style.minHeight = this.rows+"em";
var ininitalHeight = $(mirror).height();
// Bind the textarea's event
this.onkeyup = growTextarea;
// Fire the event for text already present
// sendContentToMirror(this);
});
};
$(function(){
$('textarea').trackRows();
});