Highlight text on focus for all input textboxes using jQuery

Hello friend, in this post I am going to share simple code by which you can select or highlight a text of all input textboxes of your HTML page.

If you are already using jQuery and has advanced knowledge of it then you might found this code very easy but for freshers or newbies in jQuery will definetely get benefited by this.

Let's start.

You might know that we have an event called "onfocus" which gets triggered when input gets foucs on it. I am using this event to select or highlight the text by calling simple inbuilt method of jQuery called "select()" like below code.

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("input:text").focus(function () { $(this).select(); }); 
})

Though above code works pretty well with IE and Firefox but it may not work on Google Chrome. In Chrome, If you observe the behaviour with above code then you will find that the text gets selected on focus but immediatly the cursor comes at end which removes the selection. So to make this code work in Chrome too you need to add one more line of code to handle mouseup event like below which is creating problem.

$(document).ready(function() {
   $("input:text").mouseup(function(e){ e.preventDefault();});
   $("input:text").focus(function () { $(this).select(); }); 
});

Check out the live fiddle below.

You might thinking what is the use of this then the answer is sometimes user of the application may need to provide inputs several times in same textbox in that case he can just type a new text which will overrite the selected text without need of explicitly clearing the existing text with backspace key or delete key.

Hope this simple code has added something positive in your knowledge bank. If you too having such useful code do share with us in comment section or by visitng our contact us page. Thanks.