Using jQuery to test if an input has focus

Question

On the front page of a site I am building, several

s use the CSS :hover pseudo-class to add a border when the mouse is over them. One of

Answer 1

I had a .live("focus") event set to select() (highlight) the contents of a text input so that the user wouldn't have to select it before typing a new value.

$(formObj).select();

Because of quirks between different browsers, the select would sometimes be superseded by the click that caused it, and it would deselect the contents right after in favor of placing the cursor within the text field (worked mostly ok in FF but failed in IE)

I thought I could solve this by putting a slight delay on the select...

setTimeout(function(){$(formObj).select();},200);

This worked fine and the select would persist, but a funny problem arose.. If you tabbed from one field to the next, the focus would switch to the next field before the select took place. Since select steals focus, the focus would then go back and trigger a new "focus" event. This ended up in a cascade of input selects dancing all over the screen.

A workable solution would be to check that the field still has focus before executing the select(), but as mentioned, there's no simple way to check... I ended up just dispensing with the whole auto highlight, rather than turning what should be a single jQuery select() call into a huge function laden with subroutines...