I need help with selecting a complete line from a paragraph when a user has highlighted some text in it. My main objective is to add a line break at that particular line location. I have been struggling with this for a while now and cannot find a straightforward solution. The scenario is that users select some text within a paragraph and I want to programmatically grab the entire line that contains their selection. Once I have the full line selected, I plan to insert a line break there. I have tried various approaches but none seem to work properly with Google Docs paragraph structure. Has anyone dealt with this kind of text manipulation before? Any suggestions for alternative methods would be greatly appreciated. I am open to creative workarounds if direct line selection is not possible.
I encountered a similar issue while working on a document project. Google Docs doesn’t handle text in traditional “lines” due to its continuous paragraph model. What worked for me was leveraging the Range API to determine the user’s text selection. From there, I used the getRangeElement() function to pinpoint the paragraph containing the selected text and then analyzed it to identify where a line break could fit naturally. Instead of trying to select a line directly, I focused on sentence breaks or specific character placements. Using insertText() with a line break character at the selection point tends to yield better results than manipulating existing structures. It requires some experimentation, but it is manageable once you understand how Google Docs processes text.
Same headache here with Google Docs API! I ended up using getSelection() and expanding out from the cursor until hitting whitespace or punctuation. Just scan backwards and forwards from the click point to find natural breaks. Much easier than wrestling with paragraph structure.
The problem happens because Google Docs sees paragraphs as one big text block, not separate lines. I got around this by using getActiveRange() to grab what the user selected, then expanding it to hit logical boundaries in the paragraph. Instead of trying to select a whole visual line, I looked for natural break points like sentence endings or specific word boundaries near the selection. The breakthrough was combining replaceText() with regular expressions to find and modify text exactly where I wanted it. This completely sidesteps the line selection problem while still letting you insert breaks at the right spots in the paragraph.