Preserve text selection in contenteditable while interacting with jQuery

You could save and restore the selection using simple functions such as the following when the dialog is opened and closed. I am not familiar enough with jQuery dialogs to know the mechanism for hooking into the dialog opening and closing. The first, saveSelection, returns you a Range or TextRangeobject that you should store in a variable which you later pass to restoreSelection:

function saveSelection() {
    if (window.getSelection) {
        sel = window.getSelection();
        if (sel.getRangeAt && sel.rangeCount) {
            return sel.getRangeAt(0);
        }
    } else if (document.selection && document.selection.createRange) {
        return document.selection.createRange();
    }
    return null;
}

function restoreSelection(range) {
    if (range) {
        if (window.getSelection) {
            sel = window.getSelection();
            sel.removeAllRanges();
            sel.addRange(range);
        } else if (document.selection && range.select) {
            range.select();
        }
    }
}