Selecting text in mobile Safari on iPhone

Question

I\'m trying to make it easy for an iphone user to copy some text to the clipboard in mobile safari. As in the usual \"touch-hold-copy\". There is a specific bit of text I wa

Answer 1

Try ontouchstart instead of onfocus. Onfocus fires approx. 500ms after ontouchend, same as onclick, onmousedown, and onmouseup. See https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/HandlingEvents/HandlingEvents.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006511-SW7 for more details on mouse events.

Answer 2

instead of this.select(); I used the following and it worked!

this.selectionStart=0;
this.selectionEnd=this.value.length;

Answer 3

The magic sauce for me was the combination of these three:

onFocus="this.selectionStart=0; this.selectionEnd=this.value.length;" <!-- for big screens -->

onTouchEnd="this.selectionStart=0; this.selectionEnd=this.value.length;" <!-- for small screens -->

onMouseUp="return false" <!-- to stop the jitters -->

Answer 4

I have run into the same problem. The onfocus event is the right one to trap (ontouchstart isn't triggered if you use the iphone keyboard [next]/[prev] buttons.) If you put an alert(); in your onfocus="" handler, you'll see the alert box pop up. The problem is this.select(); I still haven't found an answer to this, but when/if I do, I'll post it here.