Is there a way to get the cursor position index of html text field

Question

I'm trying to work on a text pad like MC with "insert text at
position X" and "find and replace" can anyone tell me how to find
the cursor index of an html text field. Selection.getBeginIndex() ,
Selection.getEndIndex(), Selection.getCaretIndex() as far as I know
these methods only work with text and not htmltext.
What I'm trying to do is assign different parts of the string
to variables so that I can combine them to reconstitute my html
string.

Answer 1

enfantterrible:
If I understand correctly, you want the corresponding
position in the
htmlText propery of the caret index (which as you point out
is only the
position in the plain text version of the textfield content).
Below is how I would do it. Maybe there's an easier or more
efficient
way (using XML objects etc), but I don't know it. You could
conduct all
your string searches in the plain text and then convert the
result to
the html positions. I didn't build this to accept negative
parameters
for the pos parameter (e.g. from end of string backwards) but
the
function could be adapted to do this too if necessary. The
test data is
not proper html from a text field, but it doesn't really
matter what it
is so long as its formatted correctly. It just separates the
tags from
the content to enable apples with apples comparison.
//some test data
var testStringXML = "<format>Hel<b>lo i can't
t<i>ell you h</i>ow hap</b>py I
am.</format>";
var undecoratedString = "Hello i can't tell you how happy I
am.";
//the conversion function
function findDecoratedPosition(pos:Number, xmlString:String,
test:Boolean):Number {
//anything between '<' and '>' should be excluded from
plain text search.
//create an array of array elements (n=2) consisting of tag
then plain text
//requires correctly formatted xml/html
var tempArr:Array = xmlString.split("<");
for (var aa = 0; aa<tempArr.length; aa++) {
tempArr[aa] = tempArr[aa].split(">");
//remove the first and last elements of the new array (these
are empty)
tempArr.pop();
tempArr.shift();
//find the corresponding plaintext location and calculate
the "decorated" position
var retPos:Number = 0;
var posCount:Number = 0;
for (var aa = 0; aa<tempArr.length; aa++) {
retPos += tempArr[aa][0].length+2+tempArr[aa][1].length;
//+2 allows for missing < and >
posCount += tempArr[aa][1].length;
if (posCount>pos) {
return (retPos+(pos-posCount));
//out of range
return -1;
//test code:
for (var aa = 0; aa<undecoratedString.length; aa++) {
var altPos = findDecoratedPosition(aa, testStringXML);
trace(undecoratedString.charAt(aa)+" in position "+aa+"
plainText equates to position "+altPos+" in the decorated version
["+testStringXML.charAt(altPos)+"]");
}