Select Text & highlight selection or get selection value (React)

Question

I have a React application which displays some spans:

Hello my name  is &l         


        

Answer 1

Due to this bug in Firefox, I was unable to get it working with window.getSelection() as suggested by other answers.

So I had to do the following (in React):

constructor(props) {
    this.textAreaRef = React.createRef();
}

getSelection() {
    const textArea = (this.textAreaRef.current as HTMLTextAreaElement);
    console.log(textArea.value.substring(
            textArea.selectionStart,
            textArea.selectionEnd
        )
    );
}

render() {
     this.getSelection()}
                        ref={this.textAreaRef}>
    
}