Here’s a version that gives you the actual selected and partially selected nodes rather than clones. Alternatively you could use my Rangy library, which has a getNodes()
method of its Range objects and works in IE < 9.
function nextNode(node) {
if (node.hasChildNodes()) {
return node.firstChild;
} else {
while (node && !node.nextSibling) {
node = node.parentNode;
}
if (!node) {
return null;
}
return node.nextSibling;
}
}
function getRangeSelectedNodes(range) {
var node = range.startContainer;
var endNode = range.endContainer;
// Special case for a range that is contained within a single node
if (node == endNode) {
return [node];
}
// Iterate nodes until we hit the end container
var rangeNodes = [];
while (node && node != endNode) {
rangeNodes.push( node = nextNode(node) );
}
// Add partially selected nodes at the start of the range
node = range.startContainer;
while (node && node != range.commonAncestorContainer) {
rangeNodes.unshift(node);
node = node.parentNode;
}
return rangeNodes;
}
function getSelectedNodes() {
if (window.getSelection) {
var sel = window.getSelection();
if (!sel.isCollapsed) {
return getRangeSelectedNodes(sel.getRangeAt(0));
}
}
return [];
}