Thanx for the code. It does not work to me. I am a newbye is JQuery, please excuse the dumb questions...
This is my code and markup: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://jqueryui.com/latest/ui/ ui.core.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://jqueryui.com/latest/ui/ ui.draggable.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ $("p").live("mouseup", function() { selection = getSelectedText(); if(selection.length >= 3) { var $spn = $("<span></span>").html(selection).addClass ("selected"); // append/set this '$spn' inside another DOM object } } ); //Grab selected text function getSelectedText(){ if(window.getSelection){ return window.getSelection().toString(); } else if(document.getSelection){ return document.getSelection(); } else if(document.selection){ return document.selection.createRange().text; } } }); </script> <style> p { color:blue; } div { color:red; } span.hl { background: yellow; } #selected {background: yellow;} .selected {background: yellow;} </style> </head> <body> <div id="#container"> <p>this is the text to be selected - a part of it</div> </body> </html>