jQuery: Get the cursor position of text in input without browser specific code?

A warning about the Jquery Caret plugin.

It will conflict with the Masked Input plugin (or vice versa). Fortunately the Masked Input plugin includes a caret() function of its own, which you can use very similarly to the Caret plugin for your basic needs - $(element).caret().begin or .end

Using the syntax text_element.selectionStart we can get the starting position of the selection of a text in terms of the index of the first character of the selected text in the text_element.value and in case we want to get the same of the last character in the selection we have to use text_element.selectionEnd.

Use it as follows:

<input type=text id=t1 value=abcd>
<button onclick="alert(document.getElementById('t1').selectionStart)">check position</button>

I'm giving you the fiddle_demo

You can't do this without some browser specific code, since they implement text select ranged slightly differently. However, there are plugins that abstract this away. For exactly what you're after, there's the jQuery Caret (jCaret) plugin.

For your code to get the position you could do something like this:

$("#myTextInput").bind("keydown keypress mousemove", function() {
  alert("Current position: " + $(this).caret().start);
});

You can test it here.