HTMLTextAreaElement: setRangeText() method

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The setRangeText() method of the HTMLTextAreaElement interface replaces a range of text in an <textarea> element with new text passed as the argument.

Additional optional parameters include the start of the section of text to change, the end of the section, and a keyword defining what part of the <textarea> should be selected after the text is updated. If the startSelection and endSelection arguments are not provided, the range is assumed to be the selection.

The final argument determines how the selection will be set after the text has been replaced. The possible values are "select", which selects the newly inserted text, "start", which moves the selection to just before the inserted text, "end", which moves the selection to just after the inserted text, or the default, "preserve", which tries to preserve the selection.

In addition, the select and selectchange events are fired.

Syntax

js
setRangeText(replacement)
setRangeText(replacement, startSelection)
setRangeText(replacement, startSelection, endSelection)
setRangeText(replacement, startSelection, endSelection, selectMode)

Parameters

replacement

The string to insert.

selectionStart Optional

The index of the first selected character. An index greater than the length of the element's value is treated as pointing to the end of the value.

selectionEnd Optional

The index of the character after the last selected character. An index greater than the length of the element's value is treated as pointing to the end of the value. If selectionEnd is less than selectionStart, then both are treated as the value of selectionEnd.

selectMode Optional

A keyword, either select, start, end, or the default preserve, defining how the selection should be set after the text has been replaced.

Return value

None (undefined).

Examples

Click the button in this example to replace part of the text in the text box. The newly inserted text will be highlighted (selected) afterwards.

HTML

html
<label for="ta">Example text input:</label>
<textarea id="ta">
  This text has NOT been updated.
</textarea>
<button id="btn">Update text</button>

JavaScript

js
const btn = document.getElementById("btn");

btn.addEventListener("click", () => {
  changeText();
});

function changeText() {
  const textarea = document.getElementById("ta");
  textarea.focus();
  textarea.setRangeText("ALREADY", 14, 17, "select");
}

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# dom-textarea/input-setrangetext-dev

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also