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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Custom Events in MooTools 1.2

    Javascript has a number of native events like "mouseover," "mouseout", "click", and so on. What if you want to create your own events though? Creating events using MooTools is as easy as it gets. The MooTools JavaScript What's great about creating custom events in MooTools is...

  • By
    MooTools 1.3 Browser Object

    MooTools 1.3 was just released and one of the big additions is the Browser object.  The Browser object is very helpful in that not only do you get information about browser type and browser versions, you can gain information about the user's OS, browser plugins, and...

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!