CaretPosition: offset property

Limited availability

This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.

The offset property of the CaretPosition interface returns an integer representing the offset of the selection in the caret position node.

This will be the character offset in a text node or the selected child node's index in an element node.

Value

An integer.

Examples

This example logs the offsetNode and offset of the caret position when clicking inside the input field.

html

<input aria-label="text field" value="Click inside this input field" />

<pre id="log"></pre>

input {
  width: 100%;
  padding: 10px;
  font-size: 16px;
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

#log {
  height: 200px;
  overflow: scroll;
  padding: 0.5rem;
  border: 1px solid black;
}

document.querySelector("input").addEventListener("click", (event) => {
  const x = event.clientX;
  const y = event.clientY;

  const caret = document.caretPositionFromPoint?.(x, y);
  if (!caret) {
    log("Not supported");
    return;
  }

  const node = caret.offsetNode;
  const offset = caret.offset;

  log(`offsetNode: ${node}`);
  log(`offset: ${offset}`);
});

const logElement = document.querySelector("#log");
function log(text) {
  logElement.innerText = `${logElement.innerText}${text}\n`;
  logElement.scrollTop = logElement.scrollHeight;
}