Problem with a variable

Hi guys! I have a little problem:
https://pastebin.com/aZLuQkVe
this code would have to find in the textarea a word that I write in the input, and after finding it, the code must highlight the first letter. So I put paragraph.setSelectionRange(indexOfFirst); in this way it would have to highlight the letter corresponding to "indexOfFirst" number, but it doesn't work.
Maybe "indexOfFirst" is not took as number, but I tried to use Number(indexOfFirst) to convert it to number, but nothing changed.
Can you help me?

Comments

[Amin]

Hi there,

setSelectionRange expects two parameters (and one more optional). I think that in your script your wrote only the start range.

See this example here and the documentation here. Hope that helped!

[AndyBullet]

Yes, but in my case, the value is the number of the position of the first letter of the word that I write in the input. If I put a number instead of indexOfFirst, it works. So the problem is that setSelectionRange doesn't take indexOfFirst as a number. Can you help me?

[Brian Krygsman]

Hi AndyBullet,

I think Amin NAIRI is correct here - setSelectionRange expects 2 parameters and you're only giving one.

This is hinted at in the name of the function: setSelectionRANGE

A selection is a highlight that has a length based on a beginning and an end. Even if the length is only 1 character. A length of 0 - where the end is not specified - is no highlight at all.

You could think of those indexes as existing between letters. So, to highlight one character at index i, you would draw a highlight from i (right before the character) to i+1 (right after the character).

In your code, you are specifying the beginning, but you are not specifying the end. If you update it to be paragraph.setSelectionRange(indexOfFirst, indexOfFirst+1), you might see some success.

[Amin]

Now that I looked at it a little bit more, I understand that you want to highlight the searched term if it is found. In that case indexOf returns a number so this should be working with the end of word, which can be searchTerm.lenght and the call to select a range could be setSelectionRange(indexOfFirst, searchTerm.lenght). But anyway, you have to provide two numbers minimum, you can't get away with only one.

[Amin]

Here is more thorough example using the selection range with an actual range to select a searched text in a paragraph.