HTMLInputElement: selectionEnd property

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 selectionEnd property of the HTMLInputElement interface is a number that represents the end index of the selected text. That is, it represents the index of the character immediately following the selection. Likewise, when there is no selection, this returns the offset of the character immediately following the current text input cursor position.

Note: According to the WHATWG forms spec selectionEnd property applies only to inputs of types text, search, URL, tel, and password. In modern browsers, throws an exception while setting selectionEnd property on the rest of input types. Additionally, this property returns null while accessing selectionEnd property on non-text input elements.

If selectionEnd is less than selectionStart, then both are treated as the value of selectionEnd.

html
<!-- using selectionEnd on non text input element -->
<label for="color">selectionStart property on type=color</label>
<input id="color" type="color" />

<!-- using selectionEnd on text input element -->
<fieldset>
  <legend>selectionEnd property on type=text</legend>
  <label for="pin">Input PIN</label>
  <input type="text" id="pin" value="impossible PIN: 102-12-145" />
  <button id="pin-btn" type="button">PIN correction</button>
</fieldset>

JavaScript

js
const colorEnd = document.getElementById("color");
const text = document.querySelector("#pin");
const pinBtn = document.querySelector("#pin-btn");
const validPinChecker = /^\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{3}/g;
const selectionEnd = text.value.length;
const selectedText = text.value.substring(text.selectionStart, selectionEnd);

pinBtn.addEventListener("click", () => {
  const correctedText = selectedText.replace(validPinChecker, "");
  text.value = correctedText;
});

// open browser console to verify output
console.log(colorEnd.selectionEnd); // Output : null

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HTMLInputElement: selectionEnd property

In this article

Value

Examples

HTML

JavaScript

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

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