Use Javascript to get selected text in Mobile Safari

Question

So I\'m working on a bookmarklet where it would be ideal for me to grab the content selected by the user using the \"loop\". Both window.getSelection and document.getSelection a

Answer 1

I have a fairly simple idea.

var latestSelection = "";
while (true)
{
    var tmp;
    if ((tmp = document.getSelection()) != "")
        latestSelection = tmp;
}

This way you would always have the latest selection in the latestSelection variable. Of course it would be expensive to have a loop run like this all the time. So you will probably want to play around with listeners or at least timers.

Hope this helps.

Update: Don't use the above code as is.

Here is how you would write the same thing in objective-c:

- (void) updateSelection
{
    NSString * tmp = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.getSelection()"];
    if (![tmp isEqualToString:@""])
        latestSelection = tmp;
}

You could have a timer execute updateSelection every x time units. If you find some good notification that let's you know that the user has interacted with the webview, you could use that to update latestSelection.