How To Disable Select In Jquery

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In this blog post, we will learn how to disable text selection in jQuery. There are situations in which you may want to prevent the user from selecting the text on your webpage for various reasons, such as protecting the content or improving the user experience.

Disabling text selection can be achieved by using the onselectstart event, which triggers when the user starts selecting text. We can return false in this event handler to prevent the default text selection behavior.

We can also use the CSS user-select property to achieve the same result without using JavaScript. However, in this article, we will focus on the jQuery approach.

Disabling Text Selection using jQuery

First, you need to include the jQuery library in your HTML file if you haven’t already. You can include it using the following script tag: 

    <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

Once you have included the jQuery library, you can now use the following code snippet to disable text selection for a specific element or the entire page. In this example, we will disable text selection for the entire page by targeting the body element. 

    $(document).ready(function() {
        $("body").on("selectstart", function() {
            return false;
        });
    });

This code snippet uses the on method to attach the selectstart event handler to the body element. Inside the event handler, we return false to prevent text selection.

If you want to disable text selection for a specific element, simply replace the body selector with the appropriate CSS selector for the element you want to target. For example, to disable text selection for all div elements, you can use the following code: 

    $(document).ready(function() {
        $("div").on("selectstart", function() {
            return false;
        });
    });

And that’s it! You now know how to disable text selection using jQuery. Keep in mind that this method is not foolproof, as users can still view and copy your content using other methods such as viewing the source code or using browser developer tools. However, it can still be a useful feature in certain situations to improve user experience or to deter casual copying of your content.