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DEC: Adding target to custom link dialog

Satheesh Babu
2001/11/08

Shows how to grab and set the target property for a link using custom dialog.

Note - if you don't understand what I'm talking about, please see the previous article.

Problem

Several people had asked me how to modify the dialog for inserting links so that they can set a "target" property too. Normally, you would expect that 'selection.createRange().target' will give you this. Though the documentation on MSDN says this is correct, it does not work.

Strategy

Only way I could find was to make a regular expression parse on the range to get the target and href out manually.

Code

An example is shown below.

   var aLINK = oRange.htmlText.match(/<a.*href=['"]*([^"' ]+)['"]*/i);
   var aTARGET = oRange.htmlText.match(/<a.*target=['"]*([^"' ]+)['"]*/i);
   args["LinkUrl"] = aLINK[1];
   args["LinkTarget"] = (aTARGET != null?aTARGET[1]:null);

Code listing for full function.

References