Character offset in an Internet Explorer TextRange

Question

As far as I can tell there\'s no simple way of retrieving a character offset from a TextRange object in Internet Explorer. The W3C Range object has a node, and the offset in

Answer 1

You can iterate through the body element's TextRange.text property using String.substring() to compare against the TextRange for which you want the character offset.

function charOffset(textRange, parentTextRange)
 { var parentTxt = parentTextRange.text;
   var txt       = textRange.text;
   var parentLen = parentTxt.length;

   for(int i=0; i < parentLen ; ++i) 
    { if (parentTxt.substring(i, txt.length+i) == txt) 
       { var originalPosition = textRange.getBookmark();

         //moves back one and searches backwards for same text
         textRange.moveStart("character",-1);
         var foundOther = textRange.findText(textRange.text,-parentLen,1);

         //if no others were found return offset
         if (!foundOther) return i;

         //returns to original position to try next offset
         else textRange.moveToBookmark(originalPosition);
       }
    }

   return -1;
 }

[Reference for findText()]