Get all DOM block elements for selected texts

It sounds like you could use Traversing from the jQuery API.

Possibly .contents()

Hope that helps!

You can use my Rangy library to do this. It provides an implementation of DOM Range and Selection objects for all browsers, including IE, and has extra Range methods. One of these is getNodes():

function isBlockElement(el) {
    // You may want to add a more complete list of block level element
    // names on the next line
    return /h[1-6]|div|p/i.test(el.tagName);
}

var sel = rangy.getSelection();
if (sel.rangeCount) {
    var range = sel.getRangeAt(0);
    var blockElements = range.getNodes([1], isBlockElement);
    console.log(blockElements);
}

Here is a es6 approach based on @Juan Mendes response:

const selection = window.getSelection();
const range = selection.getRangeAt(0);
const elementsFromAncestorSelections = range.commonAncestorContainer.getElementsByTagName("*");

const allSelectedElements = Array.from(elementsFromAncestorSelections).reduce(
  (elements, element) =>
    selection.containsNode(element, true)
      ? [...elements, element]
      : elements,
  [],
);

Key is window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0) https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/range

Here's some sample code that you can play with to do what you want. Mentioning what you really want this for in question will help people provide better answers.

var selection = window.getSelection();
var range = selection.getRangeAt(0);
var allWithinRangeParent = range.commonAncestorContainer.getElementsByTagName("*");

var allSelected = [];
for (var i=0, el; el = allWithinRangeParent[i]; i++) {
  // The second parameter says to include the element 
  // even if it's not fully selected
  if (selection.containsNode(el, true) ) {
    allSelected.push(el);
  }
}


console.log('All selected =', allSelected);

This is not the most efficient way, you could traverse the DOM yourself using the Range's startContainer/endContainer, along with nextSibling/previousSibling and childNodes.