ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Name

Selection.getFocus( ) Method — identify the text field in which the cursor currently resides

Availability

Flash 5

Synopsis

Selection.getFocus( )

Returns

A string indicating the full path to the text field variable that has keyboard focus (i.e., the one in which the cursor currently resides), for example, "_level1.myTextField". If no text field has keyboard focus, it returns null.

Description

The getFocus( ) method identifies which text field currently has focus (if any) by returning its string path. To turn that string into a variable reference, we use eval( ). For example, in the following code we identify the number of characters in the text field with focus. We retrieve the name of the field by invoking getFocus( ), and we convert that name into a variable with eval( ) :

var numChars = eval(Selection.getFocus( )).length;

Example

Because getFocus( ) returns null when no text field is selected, we may determine whether any field has focus by checking whether getFocus( ) is equal to null, as follows:

if (Selection.getFocus( ) == null) {
  trace("No field has focus");
}

See Also

Selection.setFocus( ), eval( ), Selection.getCaretIndex( )