jQuery Focus Input End of Text

Introduction

In web development, it is common to use the jQuery library to achieve various functionalities on the front-end. One such functionality is to automatically set the cursor focus on an input field at the end of the existing text.

This can be useful for improving user experience and saving time. For example, if a user wants to edit a piece of text, they can simply click on the field and start typing right away instead of having to manually move the cursor to the end of the text.

In this article, we will show you how to use jQuery to achieve this functionality in a few simple steps.

Steps to achieve the functionality

1. First, we need to add the jQuery library to our web page. We can do this by adding the following code to the head section of the HTML document.

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.6.0.min.js"></script>

2. Next, we need to create a function that will set the cursor focus at the end of an input field.

function setCursorToEnd(el) {
    el.focus();
    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();
    }
}

This function takes an input field as the argument and sets the cursor focus to the end of the text in the field. It works by checking if the input field has a selectionStart property. If it does, it sets the selectionStart and selectionEnd to the length of the field, effectively moving the cursor to the end of the text. If not, it creates a text range and selects the end of the text.

3. Finally, we need to call the setCursorToEnd function when the input field is clicked. We can do this by using the jQuery on() method as shown below.

$('input').on('click', function() {
    setCursorToEnd(this);
});

This code selects all input fields in the web page and sets the click event handler to call the setCursorToEnd function with the clicked input field as the argument.

Conclusion

By following these simple steps, we can use jQuery to automatically set the cursor focus on an input field at the end of the existing text. This can improve the user experience and save time for the user when editing text.