Get current style information in CKEditor - ckeditor

Question

How can I get information about the states of styles present on the toolbar, at the current cursor position.

Answer 1

The documentation is completely silent on this issue. As far as I can tell from digging into the source code, CKEditor doesn't keep an internal log of what the styles are at the current position. It simply recalculates them on an as-needed basis, namely whenever it needs to add new styles to a selection.
Please keep in mind that CKEditor is actually building and modifying an entire DOM tree, and so the styles it applies cascade down the nodes. It appears that the only way you can pull the style information is to traverse up the DOM tree from your current cursor position, recording the style information from each ancestor until you reach the body node of the editor.
The following code should get you started traversing up the ancestor nodes:
//Or however you get your current editor
var editor = CKEDITOR.currentInstance;
//This will pull the minimum ancestor that encompasses the entire selection,
//so if you just want to use the cursor it will give you the direct parent
//node that the cursor is inside
var node = editor.getSelection().getCommonAncestor();
//This is all the ancestors, up to the document root
var ancestors = node.getParents();
//This is the editors body node; you don't want to go past this
var editor_body = editor.getBody();
var body_ancestors = editor_body.getParents();
//The ancestors list descends from the root node, whereas we want
//to ascend towards the root
for (var i = ancestors.length - 1; i >= 0; i--;) {
//Pull the node
var a = ancestors[i];
//You've hit the body node, break out of the loop
if (a.getText() == editor_body.getText()) break;
//This is a node between the cursor's node and the editor body,
//pull your styling information from the node here
}
Thanks to the customizability of CKEditors style interface, there isn't a single set of styles that can be checked for, nor do they follow the same form (for instance, some will be CSS styles, while others will be span elements with a particular class).
My suggestion is to check for just those styles which you actually care about, and ignore the rest. It'll make the code much simpler.

Answer 2

Here is another way (based on a few attached links).
You can get the current element position by editor.getSelection().getStartElement() - (editor is CKEDITOR.instances.%the editor instance%.
Now, you can then wrap the actual element for jquery (or use the jquery adapter..):
$(editor.getSelection().getStartElement().$)
This will give you an access to use the following plugin which resolves all the styles of a given element (both inline and inherited):
/*
* getStyleObject Plugin for jQuery JavaScript Library
* From: http://upshots.org/?p=112
*
* Copyright: Unknown, see source link
* Plugin version by Dakota Schneider (http://hackthetruth.org)
*/
(function($){
$.fn.getStyleObject = function(){
var dom = this.get(0);
var style;
var returns = {};
if(window.getComputedStyle){
var camelize = function(a,b){
return b.toUpperCase();
}
style = window.getComputedStyle(dom, null);
for(var i=0;i<style.length;i++){
var prop = style[i];
var camel = prop.replace(/\-([a-z])/g, camelize);
var val = style.getPropertyValue(prop);
returns[camel] = val;
}
return returns;
}
if(dom.currentStyle){
style = dom.currentStyle;
for(var prop in style){
returns[prop] = style[prop];
}
return returns;
}
return this.css();
}
})(jQuery);
(Taken from: jQuery CSS plugin that returns computed style of element to pseudo clone that element?)
All that is left to do is:
$(editor.getSelection().getStartElement().$).getStyleObject()
Now you can check for any style asigned to the element.
Another small tip will be - what are the styles for the current cursor position, every time the position or styles are changed:
In which case you can use attachStyleStateChange callback (which is pretty atrophied by itself since is can only return boolean indication for weather or not a certain style is applied to current position).
The good thing about it is - callback is being recieved when ever the style state is changed - that is - whenever the cursor position is moved to a position with different style attributes - Any different attribute and not just the attribute the listener was ment to verify (Taken from the API http://docs.cksource.com/ckeditor_api/symbols/CKEDITOR.editor.html#attachStyleStateChange)
Combining everything together to figure out what is the current applied styles on the current cursor position Every time something is changed:
editor.on('instanceReady', function () {
//editor.setReadOnly(true);
var styleBold = new CKEDITOR.style(CKEDITOR.config.coreStyles_bold);
editor.attachStyleStateChange(styleBold, function (state) {
var currentCursorStyles = $(editor.getSelection().getStartElement().$).getStyleObject();
// For instance, the font-family is:
var fontFamily = currentCursorStyles.fontFamily;
});
});