Can I get an explanation on how to make a wysiwyg editor using a textarea? All I need it to be able to do is parse basic html tags like bold, italics, underline, etc. It doesn't need to have any buttons that inserts it, I just want to have a default text inside the textarea tags that parse the html.
Example:
<textarea cols="20" rows="20" name="ok">
<b>wat</b>
</textarea>
This will print out <b>wat</b> instead of wat inside the textarea.
Edit: jQuery is preferred
Look into the contenteditable attribute. It's supported in many modern browsers. Just add it to an element and edit away...
document.getElementById('something').contentEditable = true;
Of course it doesn't work on textareas. You'd need to swap the textarea out with a div and make that editable. You'd also need to make sure the textarea has the contents (e.g. innerHTML) of the div as its value when the form is submitted.
A textarea cannot parse HTML -- period. (Anyone can feel free to correct me on this)
The WYSIWYG editors that you see are not in a textarea, at least not in the same way. I suggest using a prebuilt editor such as TinyMCE or FCK Editor.
A textarea will not parse HTML, but by using a WYSIWYG plugin, an editor will replace the textarea and give the user the ability to view and modify the content. With some editors, such as TinyMCE, you are able to set it to Simple mode, and allow only the basics of formatting (bold, italic, underline, bullets, etc) like you are interested in. This helps keeps the editor from being cluttered with unnecessary tools.
I suggest checking out TinyMCE or CKEditor
Related
I'm trying to have a textarea input field just like when you post a new StackOverflow question. You can have line spaces, you can bold text, you can insert link etc.
However, when you push some kind of button, all of that gets translated into a long HTML string (e.g., spaces become <p> or <br>, bold becomes <strong>, link becomes <a>). Is there a way to do this with some kind of JS plug in?
What you describe is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor.
Google "WYSIWYG editor library"
Examples:
https://prosemirror.net/
https://www.tinymce.com/
This question has been answered here Rendering HTML inside textarea
What you need is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor.
There are a lot of them.
You can check out these:
Ckeditor The best web editor for everyone
TinyMCE Full featured web editing
They are very easy to use.
If I have understood what you are asking, you will need to learn regular expressions. Everything is the context is based on text replacement.
Example: because textarea does not display hyperlinks, buttons, i can do somethings like in stackoverflow.
For hyperlink, i can write something link [# http://facebook.com] or [link]http://facebook.com [link];
later, I extract the http://facebook.com and wrap it between <a></a> elements.
What everybody above said is true, you want to be looking at a WISYWG editor.
If by chance you are using Bootstrap, you may want to look at Summernote.
I have no affiliation with them, but I used it for one of my projects and was very pleased.
I am building an app where I would like users to be able to review an existing string in a <p></p> element, mouseover on the text to edit it, and see the edited version when they mouseout.
Right now I am doing that in Javascript replacing the <p> with <textarea>. I populate the <textarea> by setting its innerHTML to that of the <p> element. That works fine except that the text appear as HTML rather than as formatted text.
So for example a user might have entered something like:
"An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again."
Then when the time comes to edit the text, it would appear as:
"An old silent pond...<br>A frog jumps into the pond,<br>splash! Silence again."
Is there a way to make sure that what is displayed for editing is interpreted HTML / formatted text rather than raw HTML? I do need the formatting to be interpreted - I don't want to just strip out the HTML tags.
PS: I assume that textarea is the right way to create a window to edit some text, but I'm not married to it.
It sounds like you want to be able to edit the text while seeing and retaining the formatting? This is not something that can be done in a plain <textarea> -- you may want to look at wysiwyg editors such as TinyMCE or CKEditor
Another possibility is the HTML5 contenteditable attribute, and a javascript polyfill to support pre-HTML5 browsers.
See Storing the Changes for a basic suggestion for saving the changes made in a contenteditable section, or search the web for save contenteditable changes for many articles on the subject.
Also, Using the HTML5 attribute "contenteditable" to create a WYSIWYG walks through building up a simplistic editor (Now with Plain Ugly Buttons!)
If available, set textContent instead of innerHTML.
textarea.textContent = p.innerHTML;
If you need to support IE8, use innerText if textContent is not there.
http://jsfiddle.net/yUMtj/
EDIT: As #RobG indicates, use .value instead of .textContent for even better compatibility.
The content of a textarea element isn't parsed as HTML. There are a number of HTML based editors available, Google is your friend.
A textarea element's content is its value. The HTML specification does not define innerHTML, textContent or innerText properties for textarea elements so you should use the value property to access the value.
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
If I have a google doc with styling (bold, underline, etc), is there a way to parse the formatting with Javascript? I am trying to make an extremely simple WYSWIG -> HTML formatter, and easily was able to substitute whitespace with HTML, but am having a harder time with formatting.
TL/DR: If I copy and paste from a Google Doc to a textarea, can I use Javascript to see what the formatting was?
Instead of using a textbox, which will remove all formatting, you can use HTML5's contenteditable property.
<div id="editable" contenteditable="true">
edit me
</div>
If you paste something into that box, it will preserve formatting. Now you can use jQuery's .html() to get the HTML of the container.
$("#editable").html()
Demo
Is there any JS function that can change the color of certain text in a textarea?
For example, blar blar {blar} blar, {blar}, including { }, will be in blue. Other words will be in blank. In other words, all I need is a function that can change color of all text in { }.
I've done some studies and it seems that most people say it can't be done. But I'm seeing rich text editors or those wysiwyg editors having the ability to bold or underline words. There must be a way to do it.
Any suggestion is welcome.
No one mentioned contentEditable?
Just make a contentEditable div and use javascript to style it.
I reccommend you to look into the Dojo Toolkit's.
It has a Editor widget.
Other resources:
Some contentEditable problems in IE.
How to use contentEditable with jQuery or without it.
wysiwig-editors are using iframes instead of textareas. Textareas are very little customizable, since what you're after is changing part of the content. You can't add tags inside a textarea, which makes it impossible to only change part of the text.
If you look at the editor here in SO, you write normal text inside a textarea, and it is then transformed in the box below it, so you'll see the asterix inside the textbox, but in the box below, it'll transform special characters by regexing them with tags.
If you're using firebug, you can start writing inside the editor, while looking at the HTML in the preview-box.
you can't use a textarea to do that, per se.
But, javascript is your friend. Perhaps you should take a look at the code of a few rich text editors.
You could start with lwrte, since it says its "lightweight". Also, its written in jquery so it will be pretty easy to undertand. (and I'm a jquery fanboy).
Hope that helps,
jrh
I Think You will need to use execCommand method of javascript it controls many thing such this stuff of changing specifc textcolor
Regards
But some Jquery WYSIWYG editors do this ! How is that possible ? See this editor lwrte