How to set the caret (cursor) position in a contenteditable element (div)?

In most browsers, you need the Range and Selection objects. You specify each of the selection boundaries as a node and an offset within that node. For example, to set the caret to the fifth character of the second line of text, you'd do the following:

function setCaret() {
    var el = document.getElementById("editable")
    var range = document.createRange()
    var sel = window.getSelection()
    
    range.setStart(el.childNodes[2], 5)
    range.collapse(true)
    
    sel.removeAllRanges()
    sel.addRange(range)
}

<div id="editable" contenteditable="true">
  text text text<br>text text text<br>text text text<br>
</div>

<button id="button" onclick="setCaret()">focus</button>

IE < 9 works completely differently. If you need to support these browsers, you'll need different code.

jsFiddle example: http://jsfiddle.net/timdown/vXnCM/

Most answers you find on contenteditable cursor positioning are fairly simplistic in that they only cater for inputs with plain vanilla text. Once you using html elements within the container the text entered gets split into nodes and distributed liberally across a tree structure.

To set the cursor position I have this function which loops round all the child text nodes within the supplied node and sets a range from the start of the initial node to the chars.count character:

function createRange(node, chars, range) {
    if (!range) {
        range = document.createRange()
        range.selectNode(node);
        range.setStart(node, 0);
    }

    if (chars.count === 0) {
        range.setEnd(node, chars.count);
    } else if (node && chars.count >0) {
        if (node.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) {
            if (node.textContent.length < chars.count) {
                chars.count -= node.textContent.length;
            } else {
                range.setEnd(node, chars.count);
                chars.count = 0;
            }
        } else {
           for (var lp = 0; lp < node.childNodes.length; lp++) {
                range = createRange(node.childNodes[lp], chars, range);

                if (chars.count === 0) {
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
    } 

    return range;
};

I then call the routine with this function:

function setCurrentCursorPosition(chars) {
    if (chars >= 0) {
        var selection = window.getSelection();

        range = createRange(document.getElementById("test").parentNode, { count: chars });

        if (range) {
            range.collapse(false);
            selection.removeAllRanges();
            selection.addRange(range);
        }
    }
};

The range.collapse(false) sets the cursor to the end of the range. I've tested it with the latest versions of Chrome, IE, Mozilla and Opera and they all work fine.

PS. If anyone is interested I get the current cursor position using this code:

function isChildOf(node, parentId) {
    while (node !== null) {
        if (node.id === parentId) {
            return true;
        }
        node = node.parentNode;
    }

    return false;
};

function getCurrentCursorPosition(parentId) {
    var selection = window.getSelection(),
        charCount = -1,
        node;

    if (selection.focusNode) {
        if (isChildOf(selection.focusNode, parentId)) {
            node = selection.focusNode; 
            charCount = selection.focusOffset;

            while (node) {
                if (node.id === parentId) {
                    break;
                }

                if (node.previousSibling) {
                    node = node.previousSibling;
                    charCount += node.textContent.length;
                } else {
                     node = node.parentNode;
                     if (node === null) {
                         break
                     }
                }
           }
      }
   }

    return charCount;
};

The code does the opposite of the set function - it gets the current window.getSelection().focusNode and focusOffset and counts backwards all text characters encountered until it hits a parent node with id of containerId. The isChildOf function just checks before running that the suplied node is actually a child of the supplied parentId.

The code should work straight without change, but I have just taken it from a jQuery plugin I've developed so have hacked out a couple of this's - let me know if anything doesn't work!