Range: commonAncestorContainer property
Baseline
Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
The Range.commonAncestorContainer read-only property
returns the deepest — or furthest down the document tree — Node that
contains both boundary points of the Range. This means that if
startContainer and endContainer both refer to
the same node, this node is the common ancestor container.
Since a Range need not be continuous, and may also partially select nodes,
this is a convenient way to find a Node which encloses a
Range.
This property is read-only. To change the ancestor container of a Node,
consider using the various methods available to set the start and end positions of the
Range, such as Range.setStart() and
Range.setEnd().
Value
A Node object.
Examples
In this example, we create an event listener to handle pointerup events on
a list. The listener gets the common ancestors of each piece of selected text and
triggers an animation to highlight them.
HTML
<ul>
<li>
Strings
<ul>
<li>Cello</li>
<li>
Violin
<ul>
<li>First Chair</li>
<li>Second Chair</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
Woodwinds
<ul>
<li>Clarinet</li>
<li>Oboe</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
CSS
The .highlight class created below uses a set of CSS
@keyframes to animate a fading outline.
.highlight {
animation: highlight linear 1s;
}
@keyframes highlight {
from {
outline: 1px solid red;
}
to {
outline: 1px solid transparent;
}
}
JavaScript
document.addEventListener("pointerup", (e) => {
const selection = window.getSelection();
if (selection.type === "Range") {
for (let i = 0; i < selection.rangeCount; i++) {
const range = selection.getRangeAt(i);
playAnimation(range.commonAncestorContainer);
}
}
});
function playAnimation(el) {
if (el.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) {
el = el.parentNode;
}
el.classList.remove("highlight");
setTimeout(() => {
el.classList.add("highlight");
}, 0);
}
Result
Specifications
| Specification |
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| DOM # ref-for-dom-range-commonancestorcontainer② |
Browser compatibility
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commonAncestorContainer
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Legend
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- Full support
- Full support