Programmatically select text in a contenteditable HTML element?

If you want to select all the content of an element (contenteditable or not) in Chrome, here’s how. This will also work in Firefox, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ (possibly earlier versions too) and IE 9. You can also create selections down to the character level. The APIs you need are DOM Range (current spec is DOM Level 2, see also MDN) and Selection, which is being specified as part of a new Range spec (MDN docs).

function selectElementContents(el) {
    var range = document.createRange();
    range.selectNodeContents(el);
    var sel = window.getSelection();
    sel.removeAllRanges();
    sel.addRange(range);
}

var el = document.getElementById("foo");
selectElementContents(el);