jQuery: Get height of hidden element in jQuery

Question

I need to get height of an element that is within a div that is hidden. Right now I show the div, get the height, and hide the parent div. This seems a bit silly. Is there a better way?

I'm using jQuery 1.4.2:

$select.show();
optionHeight = $firstOption.height(); //we can only get height if its visible
$select.hide();

Answer 1

Building further on Nick's answer:

$("#myDiv").css({'position':'absolute','visibility':'hidden', 'display':'block'});
optionHeight = $("#myDiv").height();
$("#myDiv").css({'position':'static','visibility':'visible', 'display':'none'});

I found it's better to do this:

$("#myDiv").css({'position':'absolute','visibility':'hidden', 'display':'block'});
optionHeight = $("#myDiv").height();
$("#myDiv").removeAttr('style');

Setting CSS attributes will insert them inline, which will overwrite any other attributes you have in your CSS file. By removing the style attribute on the HTML element, everything is back to normal and still hidden, since it was hidden in the first place.

Answer 2

Building further on user Nick's answer and user hitautodestruct's plugin on JSBin, I've created a similar jQuery plugin which retrieves both width and height and returns an object containing these values.

It can be found here: http://jsbin.com/ikogez/3/

Update

I've completely redesigned this tiny little plugin as it turned out that the previous version (mentioned above) wasn't really usable in real life environments where a lot of DOM manipulation was happening.

This is working perfectly:

/**
 * getSize plugin
 * This plugin can be used to get the width and height from hidden elements in the DOM.
 * It can be used on a jQuery element and will retun an object containing the width
 * and height of that element.
 *
 * Discussed at StackOverflow:
 * http://stackoverflow.com/a/8839261/1146033
 *
 * @author Robin van Baalen <[e-mail]>
 * @version 1.1
 * 
 * CHANGELOG
 *  1.0 - Initial release
 *  1.1 - Completely revamped internal logic to be compatible with javascript-intense environments
 *
 * @return {object} The returned object is a native javascript object
 *                  (not jQuery, and therefore not chainable!!) that
 *                  contains the width and height of the given element.
 */
$.fn.getSize = function() {    
    var $wrap = $("<div />").appendTo($("body"));
    $wrap.css({
        "position":   "absolute !important",
        "visibility": "hidden !important",
        "display":    "block !important"
    });

    $clone = $(this).clone().appendTo($wrap);

    sizes = {
        "width": $clone.width(),
        "height": $clone.height()
    };

    $wrap.remove();

    return sizes;
};

Answer 3

In my circumstance I also had a hidden element stopping me from getting the height value, but it wasn't the element itself but rather one of it's parents... so I just put in a check for one of my plugins to see if it's hidden, else find the closest hidden element. Here's an example:

var $content = $('.content'),
    contentHeight = $content.height(),
    contentWidth = $content.width(),
    $closestHidden,
    styleAttrValue,
    limit = 20; //failsafe

if (!contentHeight) {
    $closestHidden = $content;
    //if the main element itself isn't hidden then roll through the parents
    if ($closestHidden.css('display') !== 'none') { 
        while ($closestHidden.css('display') !== 'none' && $closestHidden.size() && limit) {
            $closestHidden = $closestHidden.parent().closest(':hidden');
            limit--;
        }
    }
    styleAttrValue = $closestHidden.attr('style');
    $closestHidden.css({
        position:   'absolute',
        visibility: 'hidden',
        display:    'block'
    });
    contentHeight = $content.height();
    contentWidth = $content.width();

    if (styleAttrValue) {
        $closestHidden.attr('style',styleAttrValue);
    } else {
        $closestHidden.removeAttr('style');
    }
}

In fact, this is an amalgamation of Nick, Gregory and Eyelidlessness's responses to give you the use of Gregory's improved method, but utilises both methods in case there is supposed to be something in the style attribute that you want to put back, and looks for a parent element.

My only gripe with my solution is that the loop through the parents isn't entirely efficient.

Answer 4

You are confuising two CSS styles, the display style and the visibility style.

If the element is hidden by setting the visibility css style, then you should be able to get the height regardless of whether or not the element is visible or not as the element still takes space on the page.

If the element is hidden by changing the display css style to "none", then the element doesn't take space on the page, and you will have to give it a display style which will cause the element to render in some space, at which point, you can get the height.

Answer 5

Here's a script I wrote to handle all of jQuery's dimension methods for hidden elements, even descendants of hidden parents. Note that, of course, there's a performance hit using this.

// Correctly calculate dimensions of hidden elements
(function($) {
    var originals = {},
        keys = [
            'width',
            'height',
            'innerWidth',
            'innerHeight',
            'outerWidth',
            'outerHeight',
            'offset',
            'scrollTop',
            'scrollLeft'
        ],
        isVisible = function(el) {
            el = $(el);
            el.data('hidden', []);

            var visible = true,
                parents = el.parents(),
                hiddenData = el.data('hidden');

            if(!el.is(':visible')) {
                visible = false;
                hiddenData[hiddenData.length] = el;
            }

            parents.each(function(i, parent) {
                parent = $(parent);
                if(!parent.is(':visible')) {
                    visible = false;
                    hiddenData[hiddenData.length] = parent;
                }
            });
            return visible;
        };

    $.each(keys, function(i, dimension) {
        originals[dimension] = $.fn[dimension];

        $.fn[dimension] = function(size) {
            var el = $(this[0]);

            if(
                (
                    size !== undefined &&
                    !(
                        (dimension == 'outerHeight' || 
                            dimension == 'outerWidth') &&
                        (size === true || size === false)
                    )
                ) ||
                isVisible(el)
            ) {
                return originals[dimension].call(this, size);
            }

            var hiddenData = el.data('hidden'),
                topHidden = hiddenData[hiddenData.length - 1],
                topHiddenClone = topHidden.clone(true),
                topHiddenDescendants = topHidden.find('*').andSelf(),
                topHiddenCloneDescendants = topHiddenClone.find('*').andSelf(),
                elIndex = topHiddenDescendants.index(el[0]),
                clone = topHiddenCloneDescendants[elIndex],
                ret;

            $.each(hiddenData, function(i, hidden) {
                var index = topHiddenDescendants.index(hidden);
                $(topHiddenCloneDescendants[index]).show();
            });
            topHidden.before(topHiddenClone);

            if(dimension == 'outerHeight' || dimension == 'outerWidth') {
                ret = $(clone)[dimension](size ? true : false);
            } else {
                ret = $(clone)[dimension]();
            }

            topHiddenClone.remove();
            return ret;
        };
    });
})(jQuery);

Answer 6

One workaround is to create a parent div outside the element you want to get the height of, apply a height of '0' and hide any overflow. Next, take the height of the child element and remove the overflow property of the parent.

var height = $("#child").height();
// Do something here
$("#parent").append(height).removeClass("overflow-y-hidden");

.overflow-y-hidden {
  height: 0px;
  overflow-y: hidden;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<div id="parent" class="overflow-y-hidden">
  <div id="child">
    This is some content I would like to get the height of!
  </div>
</div>