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Adding html/any tags to either side of selection - Javascript

Adding HTML/any tags to either side of selection - Javascript
The problem:
After creating a textarea box in my PHP/html file I wished to add a little more functionality and decided to make an textarea that can use formatting, for example
<textarea>
This is text that was inserted. <b>this text was selected and applied a style
via a button<b>
</textarea>
It doesn't matter what the tags are, (could be bubbles for all that I care due to the fact the PHP script, on receiving the $_POST data will automatically apply the correct tags with the tag as the style ID. Not relevant)
The Question/s
How can I create this feature using javascript?
Are there any links that may help?
And can, if there is information, can you explain it?
EDIT: Other close example but not quite is stackoverflow's editor and note that I do not wish to use 3rd party scripts, this is a learning process for me.
The tags that are inserted in the text are saved to a database and then when the page is requested the PHP replaces the tags with the style ID. If there is a work around not involving 3rd party scripts please suggest
And for the anti-research skeptics on a google search, little was found that made sense and there was Previous Research on SOF:
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8752123/how-to-make-an-online-html-editor
- Adding tags to selection
Thanks in Advance

<textarea> elements cannot contain special markup, only values. You can't apply any styling in a textarea.
What you'll need to do is fake everything that a text box would normally do, including drawing a cursor. This is a lot of work, as hackattack said.
You can do a lot if you grab jQuery and start poking around. Toss a <div> tag out there with an ID for ease and start hacking away.
I've never made one personally, but there is a lot to it. HTML5's contentEditable can maybe get you a good chunk of the way there: http://html5demos.com/contenteditable/
If you want to pass this data back to the server, you'll need to grab the innerHTML of the container and slap that into a hidden input upon submission of your form.
Here's other some things you can check out if you're just messing around:
tabindex HTML attribute, to get focus in your box from tabbing
jQuery.focus() http://api.jquery.com/focus/, to determine when someone clicks in your box
cursor: text in CSS for looks http://wap.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_class_cursor.asp
jQuery.keypress() http://api.jquery.com/keypress/, or similar for grabbing keystrokes
Edit: I think I completely misunderstood
If you're not looking for a rich text editor, and just want some helper buttons for code, maybe selectionStart and selectionEnd is what you're after. I don't know what the browser support is, but it's working in Chrome:
http://jsfiddle.net/5yXsd/

you can not do anything beside basic formatting inside a texarea. If you want complex formatting, look into setting a div's contentEditable attribute to true. Or you can make a wysisyg editor, but that is a big project. I strongly suggest using 3rd party code on this one.

I suggest you using the iframe to implement the WYSIWYG effect.
There is a property in iframe called designMode
See here for more
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Rich-Text_Editing_in_Mozilla
Also there is a lightweight example maybe you would like to take a look:
http://code.google.com/p/rte-light/source/browse/trunk/jquery.rte.js

Is there a basic/simple lightbox/overlay jQuery-based library anywhere?

Is there any Lightbox-live or overlay library out there that only provides the "basic cross-browser centered popup with a dark background" without attempting to perform requests and display images?
I would like to populate the contents myself using my own JS code which is non-trivial and all of these libraries expecting a link with something displayable inside it are unusable for my simple yet unusual (it would appear) use case...
I've gone over maybe 15 Lightbox clones today and for the life of me couldn't find a simple way to just get the basic overlay functionality without the added fluff. Is anyone familiar with something like that ?

Look into Colorbox. Check the Inline Examples. It works well.
http://jacklmoore.com/colorbox/
Look here: http://jacklmoore.com/colorbox/example1/ under "Other Content types"

Try jQuery UI dialog!

jQuery Dialog in jQuery UI might be an option to consider.
You can customize the download of the library to give you only the dialog.
Just de-select everything from here and select "Dialog" only (it will select the minimum dependencies for you):
http://jqueryui.com/download

What's the best method for creating a simple Rich-Text WYSIWYG editor?

I need to create a simple rich-text editor that saves its contents to an XML file using arbitrary markup to indicate special text styles (e.g: [b]...[/b] for bold and [i]...[/i] for italic). All the backend PHP stuff seems fairly straightforward, but the front-end WYSIWYG portion of the feature seems a bit more convoluted. I've been reticent to use one of the currently-available JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editors because the rich-text options I want to allow are so limited, and these applications are so fully-featured that it almost seems like more work to stip them down to the functions I need.
So, in setting out to create a bare-bones rich-text editor, I've encountered three approaches:
The first two approaches use the contentEditable or designMode properties to create an editable element, and the execCommand() method to apply new text styles to a selected range.
The first option uses a standard div element, executes all styling commands on that elements contents.
The second option uses the editible body of a window enclosed in an iframe, then passes any styling commands initiated from buttons in the parent document into its contentWindow to alter selected ranges in the contained body. This seems like several extra steps to accomplish the same effect as option one, but I suppose the isolation of the editable content in its own document has its advantages.
The third option uses a textarea overlaying a div, and uses the oninput JS event to update the background div's innerHTML to match the input textarea's value whenever it changes. Obviously, this requires some string finagling to to convert elements like newline characters in the textarea to <br/> in the div, but this would allow me to preserve the integrity of my [/] markup, while relegating the potentially-messy DOM manipulation to front-end display only.
I can see benefits and drawbacks for each method. the contentEditable solutions seem initially the simplest, but support for this features tends to vary across browsers, and each browser that DOES support it seems to manipulate the DOM differently when implementing execCommand(). As mentioned before, the textarea/div solution seems like the best way to preserve my arbitrary styling conventions, but the custom string-manipulation procedure to display rich text in the output div could get pretty hairy.
So, I submit to you my question: Given the development goals I've outlined, which method would you choose, and why? And of course, if there's another method I'm overlooking that might better serve my purpose, please enlighten me!
Thanks in advance!

Have you looked at http://php.net/manual/en/book.bbcode.php? This is your answer. If you are having doubts, then you are doing something wrong. :-)
Then use JS to track keyup event and simple AJAX to print preview of the input. Just like in stackoverflow.
NB It would be far more efficient to generate the preview using plain-js BBcode approach. However, do not overcomplicate stuff unless you necessary need it.

The problem with BBCode, Markdown, ... is that it's not that trivial for genpop. I suggest looking at widgEditor, it is by far the simplest WYSIWYG editor I've seen to date. It was developed some time ago, so I am not sure about compatibility, but it sure is an inspiration.
I would have included this only as a comment, since it does not directly answer your question, but I am fairly new to SA and could not find out how to do that. Sorry.

Which wysiwyg editor in Drupal will give me most control over markup?

At the moment I'm using the wysiwyg module for Drupal with tiny_mce. However, it keeps inserting all kinds of superfluous spans and other trash elements in my markup. I want to use wysiwyg mostly for semantic markup with css classes, any inline styles are a problem, because I have to clean up my html by hand - sort of defies the purpose of having a wysiwyg editor altogether. What other wysiwyg editor should I try, which will behave more sensibly?

WYMeditor, available via the WYSIWYG API, is not the fanciest editor, but it does produce XHTML markup.
BUEditor integrated via the BUEditor module, is an easily extensible system that allows you to easily define buttons and associated markup. It is a favorite of a markup-obsessed colleague of mine, so I imagine it does a good job.

In my experience ck editor is a very good solution.
The only problem i have seen it have is drop a instead of leaving a box blank
It has paste plain text and paste from word features that prevent extra markup from being dropped in
When working with a cms i think what is important usually is not how well you can enter markup, as a developer you can usually just use a text area and drop html, but how the editors will enter content.
Ck editor usually produces very clean results, as long as direct pasting from Word does not take place
As people have helped me out in the comments, there are two ways to integrate it with Drupal
WYSIWYG API module, and standalone module cKEditor

I really wanted to go with CKEditor myself but after trying to get rid of that adding breaks and spaces everywhere stuff I had to revert to plain text input.
I am currently considering markitup!, which you may want to investigate as well.
I am hopeful as I have good experiences with it on WP but I didn't get to try it on Drupal just yet.

I would suggest BUEditor, you can configure all buttons and thus control the output

Unfortunately I have yet to find an editor that doesn't try to mess with your code in one way or another. In Drupal, I've tried TinyMCE, FCKEditor, and CKEditor. In non-Drupal projects I've used Ephox EditLive and the YUI 2 Rich Text Editor. All of them try to "fix" or autoformat your code in one way or another, and to that end they are all frustrating. Of that group, Ephox EditLive is the worst offender, and ironically it's the only one that isn't free.
I've resigned myself to plain text editing in Drupal whenever there's a slight chance I may need to control the underlying HTML. My WYSIWYG editor is off by default; I whitelist pages in as needed. It's tedious, but for me it's better than playing tug-of-war with the WYSIWYG for control.

Are there any WYSIWYG HTML editors that don't mess up the code?

I've tried various editors, both desktop applications and web-based RTEs, but have not found anything that works very well. All too often, they mess up code, adding in "tag soup". Even the ones that claim to only produce valid code often produce a total mess of span tags and style attributes.
Here are some of the features I'm looking for:
mainly to use as "content creation" rather than creating whole pages or sites (I normally do the design side by hand)
supports all HTML tags (which includes <small>, <code>, <kbd>, <dl> etc)
can attach classes to the current element - many editors will insert span tags, causing mess like: <p><span style="...">...</span></p>
doesn't change code that I add (I've had editors remove hidden input fields and other stuff)
doesn't add deprecated attributes, eg border and cellspadding often get added on images and tables.
would love it if it could pick up the stylesheet I use for my page and obviously apply the styles I select
if it's a desktop app, being Linux-based is gonna be a big plus
Anyone have any recommendations? Here are some of the ones I've tried: TinyMCE, FCKeditor and various others on the web; Dreamweaver (briefly), Expression Web and KompoZer on the desktop.

Well, I'm not aware of all the existing WYSIWYG editors around, but have you considered the alternative of using a code editor and create the HTML code by hand? I know it may sound crazy at first hand, but believe me, when you start to feel comfortable with it you'll become more productive, the code is cleaner and of course, you get more flexibility.
Personally I don't like dreamweaver, but it's code editor is very good because of the intellisense that helps you remembering the tags and attributes.

I've haven't tried it, but read of it: you could try the Amaya web editor (and if you have any comments on this editor, I'd like to read them).
I expect it's mostly standards-compliant (but, doesn't run javascript).