Show selected text on page in extension popup.

[dvh]

I have basic hello world extension. I want to show in alert box what
text on page is selected. I have this code in popup page:

<script>
alert("Selected Text is : " + window.getSelection().toString());
</script>

But it write: "Selected Text is : " like there is no selected text.
Perhaps because "window" is the popup page itself. How to get to the
page in active, current tab? What I actually want is (in pseudocode):

alert(chrome.activeTab.window.getSelection().toString);

Thanks.

[Arne Roomann-Kurrik]

Your intuition is correct, the window object refers to the popup, not the current web page.

Use chrome.tabs.getSelected: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html#method-getSelected with a null argument for window to get the ID of the currently visible tab.  Then you can call chrome.tabs.executeScript to run your snippet in the context of the tab itself: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html#method-executeScript

Of course, you'll need to use message passing to pass the selected text back to the popup page.  

This is a bit convoluted, luckily I have written a sample which does more or less this: https://github.com/kurrik/chrome-extensions/tree/master/contentscript-selection

Hope that helps,

~Arne

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