Selecting Text

For text in an edit control, before you can send any text to the clipboard, that text must be selected. Highlighting of selected text is built into the edit components. When the user selects text, it appears highlighted.

The table below lists properties commonly used to handle selected text.

Properties of selected text

Property	Description
SelText	Contains a string representing the selected text in the component.
SelLength	Contains the length of a selected string.
SelStart	Contains the starting position of a string relative to the beginning of an edit control's text buffer.

For example, the following OnFind event handler searches a Memo component for the text specified in the FindText property of a find dialog component. If found, the first occurrence of the text in Memo1 is selected.

Copy Code

procedure TForm1.FindDialog1Find(Sender: TObject);
var
I, J, PosReturn, SkipChars: Integer;
begin
for I := 0 to Memo1.Lines.Count do
begin
PosReturn := Pos(FindDialog1.FindText,Memo1.Lines[I]);
if PosReturn <> 0 then {found!}
begin
Skipchars := 0;
for J := 0 to I - 1 do
Skipchars := Skipchars + Length(Memo1.Lines[J]);
SkipChars := SkipChars + (I*2);
SkipChars := SkipChars + PosReturn - 1;
      Memo1.SetFocus;
Memo1.SelStart := SkipChars;
Memo1.SelLength := Length(FindDialog1.FindText);
Break;
end;
end;
end;