Selection: rangeCount 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 Selection.rangeCount read-only property returns the number of ranges in the selection.

Before the user has clicked a freshly loaded page, the rangeCount is 0. After the user clicks on the page, rangeCount is 1, even if no selection is visible.

A user can normally only select one range at a time, so the rangeCount will usually be 1. Scripting can be used to make the selection contain more than one range.

Gecko browsers allow multiple selections across table cells. Firefox allows to select multiple ranges in the document by using Ctrl+click (unless the click occurs within an element that has the display: table-cell CSS property assigned).

Value

A number.

Examples

The following example will show the rangeCount every second. Select text in the browser to see it change.

HTML

html

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>a.1</td>
    <td>a.2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>b.1</td>
    <td>b.2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>c.1</td>
    <td>c.2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

JavaScript

setInterval(() => {
  console.log(window.getSelection().rangeCount);
}, 1000);

Result

Open your console to see how many ranges are in the selection. In Gecko browsers, you can select multiple ranges across table cells by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on macOS) while dragging with the mouse.

Specifications

Specification
Selection API # dom-selection-rangecount

Browser compatibility

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This page was last modified on ⁨Nov 22, 2024⁩ by MDN contributors.

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