Bug 4609 – window.getSelection().toString() is undefined (range object returned from window.getSelection() is useless)

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: HTML Editing

[Berndt Jung]

This should get the text of the selection's start container.  The mozilla version works, and the Safari 
version used to work (old safari).  The two examples below are meant as bookmarklets.  Safari will report 
that the returned object is a range object, but I cannot do anything with this object, such as get the start/
end containers/offsets.  Interestingly toString() does not work either, yet if it is concatinated with a string, 
it does work.

safari: <a href="javascript:d=window.getSelection();alert(d.startContainer.data);">getStartContainerText()
</a>
mozilla: <a href="javascript:d=window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0);alert
(d.startContainer.data);">getStartContainerText()</a>

[Berndt Jung]

Created attachment 3542 [details]
test cases

Drag the links to the bookmark bar to test

[Oliver Hunt]

Nice test case, although interestingly ffx seems to be able to do both mozilla+safari mechanisms for at 
least one test

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Actually, window.getSelection() does not return a Range object - it returns a Selection object (with type 
None, Caret or Range), which doesn't have startContainer <http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/
DOM:Selection>.

The patch in bug 4904 adds support for getRangeAt, so the "Mozilla" way starts to work.

Keeping this bug to track the problem with toString().

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Created attachment 5259 [details]
test case

[Justin Garcia]

Landing the toString fix.  Turns out it was defined as a method on our JS Selection object, but we didn't 
handle it in Selection::callAsFunction

getRangeAt and toString should now behave like they do in FF.