Selection: type property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨November 2017⁩.

The type read-only property of the Selection interface returns a string describing the type of the current selection.

Value

A string describing the type of the current selection. Possible values are:

None: No selection has currently been made.
Caret: The selection is collapsed (i.e., the caret is placed on some text, but no range has been selected).
Range: A range has been selected.

In this example, the event handler will fire each time a new selection is made. console.log(selection.type) will return Caret or Range depending on whether the caret is placed at a single point in the text, or a range has been selected.

let selection;

document.onselectionchange = () => {
  console.log("New selection made");
  selection = document.getSelection();
  console.log(selection.type);
};