Hi,

I have a normal textarea like this:

<textarea id="usermsg"></textarea>

I want to be able to select text within it and then click a button somewhere on the page to perform a function with that selection but the text gets deselected as I click outside the text area. Any way to prevent that?

I tried this

//clicking the 'test' element will not deselect text.
var test = document.getElementById("usermsg");
test.onmousedown = function(e){
  e = e || window.click;
  e.preventDefault();
}

but no use. This is the fiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/5zg1v2f6/

Thank you.