Get Current Cursor Position In A Textbox

If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to know the exact position of your cursor in a textbox while coding or manipulating text, you’re in luck! Being able to retrieve the current cursor position in a textbox can be a handy tool when working on various software projects. In this article, we’ll walk you through a simple method to get the current cursor position in a textbox using JavaScript.

First things first, let’s set up our HTML file. You’ll need a basic HTML structure with a textbox element where you’ll be typing your text. Make sure to give your textbox an id so we can easily target it in our script.

Next, we’ll move on to the script part. We’ll use JavaScript to get the current cursor position in the textbox. We can achieve this by adding an event listener to the textbox that listens for the 'input' event, which triggers whenever the content of the textbox changes.

In your JavaScript code, you can start by selecting the textbox element using its id. Then, you can add an event listener for the 'input' event. Within the event listener function, you can use the selectionStart property of the textbox element to retrieve the current cursor position.

Here’s an example of how this can be implemented:

<title>Get Current Cursor Position</title>


  
  
  
    const textbox = document.getElementById('myTextbox');
    
    textbox.addEventListener('input', () =&gt; {
      const cursorPosition = textbox.selectionStart;
      console.log('Current Cursor Position:', cursorPosition);
    });

In this snippet, we listen for the 'input' event on the textbox and then retrieve the current cursor position using the selectionStart property of the element. We then log the cursor position to the console for demonstration purposes.

By implementing this simple JavaScript code, you can easily keep track of the cursor position in the textbox while typing or interacting with the text. This can be particularly useful in scenarios where you need to perform specific actions based on the cursor location within the textbox.

So, next time you find yourself in need of knowing the exact cursor position in a textbox, remember this handy trick using JavaScript! Feel free to customize and enhance this code snippet to suit your specific project requirements. Happy coding!