Detect text selection with SDL_ttf 2

Question

I would like to implement a simple input box with SDL and SDL_ttf. Just like the address bar in your browser.

I'm guessing what is the easiest and most efficient way to detect a mouse selection with SDL_ttf.

Let say the box display text like this:

+--------+
| abcdef |
+--------+

The user clicks between 'c' and 'd', then it drags the mouse to the left by several pixels. Now I need to detect that it has selected the 'c' character.

The SDL_ttf library has several functions to determine the metrics of a text. You can compute the whole text size with TTF_SizeUTF8 and you can also determine a glyph size for an individual character with TTF_GlyphMetrics.

Rough idea would be to create a special array with all individual characters with their respective size just to determine their positions in the box.

Do you have better ideas on how this can be implemented easily?

Answer 1

Text selection in immediate rendering mode should be worked on from zero , which is alot of work to do. there is the legendary stb_textedit used by many immediate gui libraries like imgui , you can find it here https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_textedit.h