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Using a Chrome extension to replace characters spanning more than one line in a Facebook status update

I have created a Google Chrome extension to allow users to select text in a component. This works great for most sites. However, Facebook handles its status updates differently. It seems that even though you are filling in what seems to be a single text box, it is actually using a div > div > span > span construct for every single line in this text box. I have no idea why they chose to do this but it makes replacing multiple lines of text much more complex.
Is there a way to select multiple lines (or even contiguous portions of multiple lines) of text in a Facebook status update and replace the data?
The relevant portion of my code looks like this:
function replace_text(language){
let selection = window.getSelection();
string = selection.toString();
/* This section contains code that uses string.replace to replace characters in the string. */
document.execCommand("insertText", false, string);
}
Based on the way my code works now, if I replace text on a single line I have no problems. But, if I replace text that spans multiple lines I end up with a blank unusable input box. Undoubtedly it is because it is removing portions of the html code. How can I fix my code so that the replacement process works properly not only for other sites but also for Facebook?

As of this moment, the one common theme among all status updates (and comments) are that their texts reside within a single or set of span elements with the attribute data-text set to true. So let's target those:
document.querySelectorAll("span[data-text='true']");
For me, I've typed into the status field 3 lines and comment field 1 line of dummy text. So when I execute the above code into the console it returns an array of those four cumulative lines:
>>> (4) [span, span, span, span]
With that array, I can use the Array.prototype.forEach() method to iterate through the spans and replace the innerText:
document.querySelectorAll("span[data-text='true']").forEach(function(element) {
element.innerText = element.innerText.replace('Lorem ipsum','Hello world');
});
However, it is important to note that these changes are being made in the HTML itself and Facebook doesn't store all of its data directly in the HTML. Therefore it can cause undesirable events to occur when you type text into a field, unfocus, change the text in the field, and refocus that field. When you refocus I believe it grabs data of what the text was, before you unfocused that field, from an ulterior source like React's Virtual DOM. To deter it from doing that, the changes either need to be made after clicking the field (real or simulate) or as the user is typing using some sort of MutationObserver (src).

Custom action links in .PDF...write Javascript to alter the appearance of links when clicked?

I have a .pdf document that contains custom links which run Javascript code.
There is no issue with the actual functionality of the working portion of the JS, but I do have one formatting/display problem that I havent been able to solve:
Is it possible to write JS that will alter the appearance of individual links as they are clicked?
I know I can programmatically change the appearance of all links on a page by looping through the doc.getLinks result and applying formatting changes to each element of the getLinks array. But I don't know how to refer to a specific link, as/after it's clicked, either by referencing that link's index location within the getLinks array, or by referring to it by any other name, handle, etc.
I would think that this is probably possible to do, but I'm at a loss.
Thanks in advance for any pointers!
EDIT: One thing to clarify...I can do everything I need to do for a single button. That is, I can manually find the button name, and manually enter the JS code to change the appearance of that particular button. To do this, I need to physically look up the name of the button using a few mouse clicks, and then hard code that button's name in my JS getField command. This requires different code for each and every button.
Is it possible to accomplish the same function using the same code for each and every button?
My ultimate objective is to be able to reproduce this function on a series of .pdf files that will, jointly, have thousands of individual buttons. So any manual component of this process will make implementation impractical.
I should have originally phrased the question in terms of, is it possible to write JS code that can automatically detect the name of the button which is calling the code? (ie, how would I implement a self-referential feature for a generic button?)

As wished by the OP…
When a script should refer to the field on which it is running, the field object to use is event.target.
An example:
You have a button which, when clicked, should change the width of the border between 1 and 3. The mouseUp event would containt this piece of code:
if (event.target.lineWidth == 1) {
event.target.lineWidth = 3 ;
} else {
event.target.lineWidth = 1 ;
}
Or another example: when the number in the calculated text field is negative, it should be in red, otherwise in black:
In the Format event of that field, you would add:
if (event.value*1 < 0) {
event.target.textColor = color.red ;
} else {
event.target.textColor = color.black ;
}
And that should give an idea on how to use event.target.

Updating a text box with javascript

I am having some trouble with some javascript and how it can control the html "text box".
First, here's what I have;
javascript:
function UpdateOrder()
{
// enable/disable appropriate buttons
document.getElementById("reset").disabled=false;
document.getElementById("add").disabled=false;
document.getElementById("submit").disabled=false;
document.getElementById("edit").disabled=false;
document.getElementById("update").disabled=true;
// Show display box, 'DispCurOrder'
document.getElementById('all_labels').disabled=true;
}
function EditOrder()
{
// enable/disable appropriate buttons
document.getElementById("reset").disabled=true;
document.getElementById("add").disabled=true;
document.getElementById("submit").disabled=true;
document.getElementById("edit").disabled=true;
document.getElementById("update").disabled=false;
document.getElementById('all_labels').disabled=false;
}
The Idea is simple... I have some buttons and inputs to generate a 'line' of text that get's dumped to the disabled text box. If the operator notices that they made a type-o or want to change something, they click on 'edit order' and it disables all the regular buttons, and enables the text box and 'update' button. The 'update order' button reverses this.
Now, when I just use the add lines to the text box, all works well. You can see each line get appended to the text box (there's another java function that does a bunch of error checking and such, but the crux is that it takes the contents of the text box, parses it on the "\n" to an array, then appends the new line of text. It then takes the array and puts it all together as a new string and puts it back into the text box. Here is that portion without all the error checking stuff;
function AppendOrder()
{
// let's set up an error flag.
var AppendError="";
var str1=document.forms["MyForm"].DataEntry1.value;
var str2=document.forms["MyForm"].DataEntry2.value;
if( /* checking variable str1 for errors */)
{
AppendError="Error in str 1 here";
}
if( /* checking variable str1 for errors */)
{
AppendError=AppendError+"Error in str 2 here";
}
// Display the error message, if there are no errors, it will clear what was there.
$('#AppendStatus').html(AppendError);
if(AppendError=="")
{
// it's all good, update the display
// create line of text
curEntry=str1 + " -- " + str2;
// let's get the current order into a list
str=document.getElementById('all_data').innerHTML;
if(str1=="Empty")
{
// make curOrder = to 1 element array of curEntry
var curOrder=[curEntry];
}
else
{
// parse str1 into an array and parse it to curOrder.
// Then push curEntry on the end.
var curOrder=str1.split("\n");
curOrder.push(curEntry);
}
// now we should have an array called 'curOrder[]'. Let's show it
// on the web page.
$('#all_labels').html(curOrder);
}
}
Now, the problem that I'm having is that after I add a line or two (or more) to the display using the 'add' button and then go into the 'edit' mode (where the text box is enabled) and I make all my changes, the 'add' button doesn't work.
Oddly enough, when I press the 'reset' button (which is just a reset button) it then shows all the adds I did after the edit, and the edited stuff is gone.
Now... to the question... is there something I'm not understanding about the text box? Is there some trick I need to do to get it to work? Am I going about this all wrong? Should I be using a different tool for this other than the 'textbox'?
Any help is greatly appreciated!!
Greg

Found the typo in your jsFiddle.
The first thing that I did was to add:
alert('hi there');
to the very top of the script, inside the $(document).ready() wrapper. Note that on jsFiddle you cannot see the document.ready wrapper, it is invisibly included, so just put the alert at top of javascript block as I did (link to my new jsFiddle is at bottom of answer)
Next, I noticed that you are enabling/disabling several controls by referencing them individually by ID. You can reference several controls at one time if they share the same class, so I invented the class="orderentry" and added that attribute to each of those controls. This removed 8 lines of code, which made troubleshooting easier.
Then, I began deleting/undeleting. First, I deleted everything in the javascript panel except alert('hi there');, and ran the jsFiddle. The alert popped up. Great. So I used Ctrl+z to undelete everything. Next, I selected everything EXCEPT the next block of code, and deleted the selection. I ran the jsFiddle, and again the alert popped up.
I continued deleting/undeleting until I found out where the alert no longer worked -- and that revealed the offending code block. Just had to carefully study the syntax in that specific area and found the error:
$('#txtOrder').attr({'disabled':'disabled')}; <== ERROR: note final parentheses
instead of
$('#txtOrder').attr({'disabled':'disabled'}); <== CORRECT: note final parentheses
Hope this helped, good luck on the rest of your project.
Here is the corrected jsFiddle

You didn't share your HTML, so I made assumptions about what your markup looks like.
Working jsFiddle here
The above jsFiddle is a much simplified version of what you are creating. Obviously, it is very different from what you have done so that I could create it quickly.
Observe how I made certain things happen with jQuery; take what is useful and ignore the rest.
Specifically, you can see how I initially disabled the textarea control:
$('#txtArea').attr({'disabled':'disabled'});
Re-enabled the textarea control for editing, while also hiding the Edit button and displaying the Save button:
$('#txtArea').removeAttr('disabled');
$('#btnSave').show();
$(this).hide();
Importantly, this is how I ensure each addition adds to (rather than overwriting) existing content:
var ord = 'Requested By: ' + $('#txtReq').val() + '\r\n';
Very likely you already know many (most?) of the things I am pointing out, but I have no idea what you know so, again, keep the one or two things you find useful and ignore the rest. I only hope I've managed to hit on the bit that has you stumped at the moment.
I very rarely recommend W3Schools for anything, but look here for their excellent summary / reference of jQuery selectors, events, methods. (Keep hitting Next Chapter to cycle through all pages of this reference).

jquery, replace html on submit

I have a form which is using a select list to jump around my site. This is currently using onclick window.location so user selects the page and presses go and it goes to that page.
I now need to add a small text box for the user to type in a code (say 123456) and then when they click go, it should go to the url selected, but with the [CODE] being the number entered in the box. I discovered jquery replaceAll so it gave me the idea to have this in the select html:
http ://jumptothispage.com/parts/p[CODE]/edit
http ://jumptothispage.com/jobs/j[CODE]/edit
When you press go, it would replace all [CODE] in that html with the code entered and then jump to that page selected, e.g.
http ://jumptothispage.com/parts/p123456/edit
http ://jumptothispage.com/jobs/j123456/edit
I am already using jquery on my site so makes sense to try and utilize that again. I'd appreciate a pointer and or other suggestions instead.
Thanks,
Paul.

A workaround: Store the code in a cookie, so at least it's not visible to every person who looks at the URL bar. Then in every onclick, fit it into the URL to send the user to the "right" page.
Or, have your select option's value literally read CODE, which your onclick interprets to mean "The user hasn't set the code yet." When the user types in the code, store it in a variable (in the example below, realcode), and you can then do this:
$('select#navigation option').each(function(idx, el) {
$(el).attr('value', $(el).attr('value').replace(/CODE/, realcode));
});

TinyMCE Plugin building

I am working on modifying an existing spell check plugin for TinyMCE.
This is what is supposed to happen:
1. User hits "space" and the spell check runs.
2. If the word is spelled wrong the word gets wrapped with a span and gets a red underline
what I find happening is that when the user hits space bar the word does get spell checked but the cursor pops back to the end of the word just typed (instead of to where the space is) (you can see this in action at http://mail.solidhouse.com/webmail2/test.html)
here is my pseudcode:
var b = this.editor.selection.getBookmark();
//for each node
node.nodeValue.replace(r5, '$1$2');
this.editor.selection.moveToBookmark(b);
what I am suspecting is that moveToBookmark keeps the cursor within the element but I have no idea what to do to remedy this.
(I have tried incrementing b.start and b.end but that did not work)
I know this is hard to explain. Any thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.

try incrementing the bookmark start/end by 2 instead of 1 if you haven't already. since the underline adds a tag around the mispelled words, that's an additional 2 places that need to be accounted for in the bookmark: 1 for each side of the span.

Can you get yourself out of the element by grabbing its parent?
this.parentNode.moveToBookmark(b);
Or something like that.