How do I scroll an overflowed div to a certaing ha

Question

On my webpage I have an overflowed div (i.e. with the vertical scrollbar). Inside the div, I have anchors with ids. When I put one of these ids in the URL (mypage.html#id), I want the div, not the page, to scroll to that anchor.

How do I do that, preferably with plain JavaScript? If it's too complex, I'll go with jQuery, but I'm not using it in this project for anything else.

Answer 1

Have you tried to set focus() on the anchor?

Any DOM element with a tabindex is focusable, and any element which has focus will be scrolled into view by the browser.

Answer 2

This is a pure Javascript (ECMA 6) solution, similar to Ariel's answer.

const overflow = document.querySelector('.overflow');
const anchor = document.getElementById('anchor');

// Get the bounding client rectangles for both
// the overflow container and the target anchor
const rectOverflow = overflow.getBoundingClientRect();
const rectAnchor = anchor.getBoundingClientRect();

// Set the scroll position of the overflow container
overflow.scrollTop = rectAnchor.top - rectOverflow.top;

Answer 3

$('.overflow').scrollTop($('#anchor').offset().top);

There is no reason at all you can't convert this to standard javascript.

Note that the scroll will be off if there is a margin on the anchor element.