How to insert text at cursor position using jQuery

In this post I am sharing how you can insert text at cursor postion in focused textbox or textarea.

I have used the function provided by Eli(http://stackoverflow.com/users/1479606/eli) in one of the stackoverflow answer, so all credit goes to her. In this function text gets inserted at cursor position but to handle multiple textarea or I haved some more code which I am going to share here.

The core logic to insert text is reside in te above function only but to handle multiple textarea's we need to consider handling focus event and track currently focused textarea only.

Below is the HTML code

<textarea class="inputHolder" cols="30" rows="10"></textarea>
<textarea class="inputHolder" cols="30" rows="10"></textarea>
<input type="text" id="txtInput"  />
<br/>
<br/>
<button id="test">Insert "Test" at Cursor position</button>

I have used a class below class to identify which input is currently focused, for demo purpose I have added a border.

.insertatcaretactive
{
border:1px soild #1e90ff;
}

Now actual JS code which handles this functionality

$.fn.EnableInsertAtCaret = function() {
$(this).on("focus", function() {        $(".insertatcaretactive").removeClass("insertatcaretactive");
     $(this).addClass("insertatcaretactive");
});
};


function InsertAtCaret(myValue) {

    return $(".insertatcaretactive").each(function(i) {
        if (document.selection) {
            //For browsers like Internet Explorer
            this.focus();
            sel = document.selection.createRange();
            sel.text = myValue;
            this.focus();
        } else if (this.selectionStart || this.selectionStart == '0') {
            //For browsers like Firefox and Webkit based
            var startPos = this.selectionStart;
            var endPos = this.selectionEnd;
            var scrollTop = this.scrollTop;
            this.value = this.value.substring(0, startPos) + myValue + this.value.substring(endPos, this.value.length);
            this.focus();
            this.selectionStart = startPos + myValue.length;
            this.selectionEnd = startPos + myValue.length;
            this.scrollTop = scrollTop;
        } else {
            this.value += myValue;
            this.focus();
        }
    })
}

And now implementation of the above js code.

$(".inputHolder,#txtInput").EnableInsertAtCaret();

$('#test').click(function() {
    InsertAtCaret('test');
});

In above code, just to show how you can use multiple selectors, I have used one input with id and two textarea's with a class name but you can use single class for all input too.

Below is the live fiddle of the same code.

Hope you have benefited from this post. This code can be optimized in more better way so if you have an alternative or something positive to add this post. Do share it in comment section. Thanks.