Move Caret to End of Input or Textarea

By  on  

One of the annoying parts of using the focus method of HTML elements is that they don't move the cursor to the end of INPUT or TEXTAREA elements if they already have content in them.  That's probably the last thing a user would want.  I was browsing through Stack Overflow when I found this gem:  a function that moves the cursor to the end of an INPUT or TEXTAREA on command!

function moveCursorToEnd(el) {
    if (typeof el.selectionStart == "number") {
        el.selectionStart = el.selectionEnd = el.value.length;
    } else if (typeof el.createTextRange != "undefined") {
        el.focus();
        var range = el.createTextRange();
        range.collapse(false);
        range.select();
    }
}

Simply pass the element to the function above and you'll see the caret move to the end of the element!  Caret management in the browser sucks, but this function makes it incredibly easy.  Enjoy!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fade Images with MooTools LazyLoad

    I recently received an email from a MooTools developer asking a great question about my LazyLoad class: "I'm using your LazyLoad MooTools plugin (which is great, by the way). I have been trying to figure out how to modify it so that once an image scrolls into...

  • By
    MooTools Equal Heights Plugin:  Equalizer

    Keeping equal heights between elements within the same container can be hugely important for the sake of a pretty page. Unfortunately sometimes keeping columns the same height can't be done with CSS -- you need a little help from your JavaScript friends. Well...now you're...

Discussion

  1. Brilliant piece of code..!! As always, I really enjoy your nifty scripts and this one made my day.
    Many Thanks David.

  2. Hello! Did you know you can also do a slight variation on the input.value = input.value; hack to make it work cross browser, something like:

    function focusAtEnd(el) {
      el.focus();
      var s = el.value;
      el.value = '';
      el.value = s;
    }
    
    • Thanks for commenting Chris! That will work but occasionally you see the “content flash” which is less than ideal.

  3. Agreed. Plus, I can’t imagine it’s very future proof relying on the behavioiur of the caret when setting the value. Your method is definitely the right way to do it.

  4. What if the user had clicked a very precise word to edit it ? Wont it be annoying to have the cursor at the end of the input when you clicked the beginning ? Maybe this method should only be used when the user is accessing a field with the tab key.

  5. Gergő Gyula

    Great snippet, just what I needed, thank you!!!

  6. Josef

    I don’t believe that this will work in Chrome on type=number inputs.

  7. Daniel Lidström

    Does it also scroll the text left so that the cursor is visible? This is a problem on iOS when the text is longer than the width of the input element.

  8. Sándor Hatvani

    Thank you.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!