jQuery: Get the cursor position of text in input without browser specific code?

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Answer 1

You can't do this without some browser specific code, since they implement text select ranged slightly differently. However, there are plugins that abstract this away. For exactly what you're after, there's the jQuery Caret (jCaret) plugin.

For your code to get the position you could do something like this:

$("#myTextInput").bind("keydown keypress mousemove", function() {
  alert("Current position: " + $(this).caret().start);
});

You can test it here.