In most browsers, you need the Range
and Selection
objects. You specify each of the selection boundaries as a node and an offset within that node. For example, to set the caret to the fifth character of the second line of text, you’d do the following:
function setCaret() {
var el = document.getElementById("editable")
var range = document.createRange()
var sel = window.getSelection()
range.setStart(el.childNodes[2], 5)
range.collapse(true)
sel.removeAllRanges()
sel.addRange(range)
}
<div id="editable" contenteditable="true">
text text text<br>text text text<br>text text text<br>
</div>
<button id="button" onclick="setCaret()">focus</button>
IE < 9 works completely differently. If you need to support these browsers, you’ll need different code.
jsFiddle example: http://jsfiddle.net/timdown/vXnCM/