getselection - How to get selected html text with javascript?

Question

(This question already has an answer here): question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5643635/how-to-get-selected-html-text-with-javascript

Answer 1

In IE <= 10 browsers, it's:

document.selection.createRange().htmlText

As @DarrenMB pointed out IE11 no longer supports this. See this answer for reference.

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In non-IE browsers, I just tried playing with this... this seems to work, WILL have side effects from breaking nodes in half and creating an extra span, but it's a starting point:

var range = window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0),
  content = range.extractContents(),
     span = document.createElement('SPAN');

span.appendChild(content);
var htmlContent = span.innerHTML;

range.insertNode(span);

alert(htmlContent);

Unfortunately, I can't seem to put the node back as it was (since you can be pulling half the text from a span, for instance).