Auto Select Text Within a Text Box

***** Updated 9/24/2007 *****Thanks to Marko for pointing out an IE/Firefox issue. For those of you who already used this code, you may find out that the auto select is only working in Internet Explorer. To get it to work in both IE and Firefox, simply change < textarea name to read < textarea id. Those of you new to this post, please just follow the instructions below! Thank You.*****

Anyone who has changed their Myspace layout (prior to the built in layout editor) or copied code from a tutorial/code repository has run across a Html text box that auto selects all the text it is holding when ever the mouse is clicked inside it. It is a nice feature to have for any of your users and eliminates the mistake of not selecting all the code that needs to be copied.

One of my co-workers came to me yesterday and asked if I new how to get that feature to work, since getting our product Talkr onto your own website is done through copying and pasting code that we have available on an html page. It took a lot of searching, but after finding the right combination of words, I finally found out how to do it using some simple Java script.

I am going to assume that you have your Html page set up, and that you a text area/box placed and ready for the code. For the purpose of this example, I have named my text area/box “aa”.

First, copy this code and paste it in-between the and tags at the top of your Html page using your editor of choice:

< script type=”text/javascript”>
function SelectAll(id)
{
document.getElementById(id).focus();
document.getElementById(id).select();
}
</script >

Then find this information where you have your text area/box. It will look similar but not the same:

< textarea id=”aa” rows=7 cols=32 >

and paste this after the =”aa”

onClick=”SelectAll(‘aa’);”

so it should look like this after you are finished:

< textarea id=”aa” onClick=”SelectAll(‘aa’);” rows=7 cols=32 >

And thats it!

Since I have very little to no experience coding Java by hand, this solution took me much longer to find than it did to actually implement. Hope it helps!