Dart2JS breaks the HTML5 Selection.toString() method

[jobukkit]

In both Dart and Javascript, you can get the selected/highlighted text in the browser by calling window.getSelection().toString(). However, Dart2JS breaks this. Instead of the selected text, it gives the literal string Instance of 'Selection'.

Example Dart code (works in Dartium):

String selectedText;

Selection selection = window.getSelection();
selectedText = selection.toString();

print(selectedText);

The compiled Javascript for this says something like:

selection = window.getSelection();
t2 = J.getInterceptor(selection);
t1 = t2.toString$0(selection);

After manually changing the last line to

t1 = selection.toString();

it works correctly.

[anders-sandholm]

May be a dart2js thing. If so, please re-assign labels accordingly.

[jobukkit]

I can't assign labels here..

[rakudrama]

@alan-knight Selection.toString() needs to be defined like Location.toString()

[ghost]

While I was waiting for this bug being fixed, I wrote a workaround with package:js.

get_selection_patch.dart

@JS()
library get_selection_patch;
import "package:js/js.dart";
@JS("getSelectionString")
external String getSelectionString();

get_selection_string.js

var getSelectionString = function () {
  return window.getSelection().toString();
}

[alan-knight]

This was fixed in
https://codereview.chromium.org/2669103003

but unfortunately caused test regressions and had to be reverted in
https://codereview.chromium.org/2678593002

and we haven't come back to it yet.

[rkj]

@ntaoo even simpler workaround:

import 'dart:js';
...
  context.callMethod('getSelection').callMethod('toString');

[Tomas-kubicek]

This is still a prominent issue even after all this time. When should we expect a fix?

[binarypie]

We're also wondering if this will ever be resolved.