Understanding what goes on with textarea selection with JavaScript

Start with PPK's introduction to ranges. Mozilla developer connection has info on W3C selections. Microsoft have their system documented on MSDN. Some more tricks can be found in the answers here.

In addition to incompatible interfaces you'll be happy to know that there is extra bizarreness going on with textarea nodes. If I remember correctly they behave as any other nodes when you select them in IE, but in other browsers they have an independent selection range which is exposed via the .selectionEnd and .selectionStart properties on the node.

Additionally, you should really take a look at .contentEditable as a means to edit things live. From the release of Firefox3, this is now supported by all browsers.

function get_selection(the_id)
{
    var e = document.getElementById(the_id);

    //Mozilla and DOM 3.0
    if('selectionStart' in e)
    {
        var l = e.selectionEnd - e.selectionStart;
        return { start: e.selectionStart, end: e.selectionEnd, length: l, text: e.value.substr(e.selectionStart, l) };
    }
    //IE
    else if(document.selection)
    {
        e.focus();
        var r = document.selection.createRange();
        var tr = e.createTextRange();
        var tr2 = tr.duplicate();
        tr2.moveToBookmark(r.getBookmark());
        tr.setEndPoint('EndToStart',tr2);
        if (r == null || tr == null) return { start: e.value.length, end: e.value.length, length: 0, text: '' };
        var text_part = r.text.replace(/[\r\n]/g,'.'); //for some reason IE doesn't always count the \n and \r in the length
        var text_whole = e.value.replace(/[\r\n]/g,'.');
        var the_start = text_whole.indexOf(text_part,tr.text.length);
        return { start: the_start, end: the_start + text_part.length, length: text_part.length, text: r.text };
    }
    //Browser not supported
    else return { start: e.value.length, end: e.value.length, length: 0, text: '' };
}

function replace_selection(the_id,replace_str)
{
    var e = document.getElementById(the_id);
    selection = get_selection(the_id);
    var start_pos = selection.start;
    var end_pos = start_pos + replace_str.length;
    e.value = e.value.substr(0, start_pos) + replace_str + e.value.substr(selection.end, e.value.length);
    set_selection(the_id,start_pos,end_pos);
    return {start: start_pos, end: end_pos, length: replace_str.length, text: replace_str};
}

function set_selection(the_id,start_pos,end_pos)
{
    var e = document.getElementById(the_id);

    //Mozilla and DOM 3.0
    if('selectionStart' in e)
    {
        e.focus();
        e.selectionStart = start_pos;
        e.selectionEnd = end_pos;
    }
    //IE
    else if(document.selection)
    {
        e.focus();
        var tr = e.createTextRange();

        //Fix IE from counting the newline characters as two seperate characters
        var stop_it = start_pos;
        for (i=0; i < stop_it; i++) if( e.value[i].search(/[\r\n]/) != -1 ) start_pos = start_pos - .5;
        stop_it = end_pos;
        for (i=0; i < stop_it; i++) if( e.value[i].search(/[\r\n]/) != -1 ) end_pos = end_pos - .5;

        tr.moveEnd('textedit',-1);
        tr.moveStart('character',start_pos);
        tr.moveEnd('character',end_pos - start_pos);
        tr.select();
    }
    return get_selection(the_id);
}

function wrap_selection(the_id, left_str, right_str, sel_offset, sel_length)
{
    var the_sel_text = get_selection(the_id).text;
    var selection =  replace_selection(the_id, left_str + the_sel_text + right_str );
    if(sel_offset !== undefined && sel_length !== undefined) selection = set_selection(the_id, selection.start +  sel_offset, selection.start +  sel_offset + sel_length);
    else if(the_sel_text == '') selection = set_selection(the_id, selection.start + left_str.length, selection.start + left_str.length);
    return selection;
}