Comments on: getSelection() returns empty in Google Mail

By: jason braswell

jason braswell — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:33:28 +0000

Thanks! This saved a newbie (me) a lot of time.

By: Natch

Natch — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:56:40 +0000

top.document.activeElement.contentWindow.getSelection();

For some odd reason the activeElement is always an HTML Iframe element. This works for me in Gmail.

G’luck.

By: Fraser

Fraser — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:37:50 +0000

Hi – I ran into the same problem in gmail with getSelection(). I think that it may be because gmail uses several frames – if you iterate over window.frames and call getSelection() on each one, you may find what you’re looking for.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:21:39 +0000

Hi Lenny. You can call window.content.getSelection() in a bookmarklet, but of course that won't work in Gmail. It looks like document.commandDispatcher is only available within XUL (e.g. a Firefox extension), not for regular JavaScript in a web page or bookmarklet. Sorry, I don't know of a workaround.

By: Lenny

Lenny — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:05:16 +0000

Hi Scott, I’m not sure how to use this solution in a bookmarklet.
Is that possible?

By: Bernard

Bernard — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:42:10 +0000

Any ideas how to get selected text from gmail in Chrome?

By: Gavin

Gavin — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:14:58 +0000

Thanks for this info. Exactly my problem, and solution!

Gavin

By: Craig Williams

Craig Williams — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:11:47 +0000

Hey Scott,

Thanks for posting this!
It is coming in very handy.