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!

So if I want to display the code for this:

This is a Heading

I would need to replace all “<” tag with “&lt;” and the closing “>” with “&gt;”. So, in the code view of whatever editor you prefer to use, it would look like this.

&lt; h1&gt;This is a Heading&lt; /h1 &gt;
And the web browser will display it as this:

< h1>This is a Heading< /h1 >

I hope this first post has been helpful. For any questions, please feel free to contact me.