HTMLTextAreaElement: select event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The select event fires when some text has been selected.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("select", (event) => {});

onselect = (event) => {};

Event type

A generic Event.

Examples

Selection logger

html

<textarea>Try selecting some text in this element.</textarea>
<p id="log"></p>

function logSelection(event) {
  const log = document.getElementById("log");
  const selection = event.target.value.substring(
    event.target.selectionStart,
    event.target.selectionEnd,
  );
  log.textContent = `You selected: ${selection}`;
}

const textarea = document.querySelector("textarea");
textarea.addEventListener("select", logSelection);

onselect equivalent

You can also set up the event handler using the onselect property:

textarea.onselect = logSelection;

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # event-select
HTML Standard # handler-onselect

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser