javascript - Find the "potential" width of a hidden element

Question

I'm currently extending the lavalamp plugin to work on dropdown menus but I've encountered a small problem. I need to know the offsetWidth of an element that is hidden. Now clearly this question makes no sense, rather what I'm looking for is the offsetWidth of the element were it not hidden.

Is the solution to show it, grab the width, then hide again? There must be a better way...

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1841124/find-the-potential-width-of-a-hidden-element

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is to show it (or a clone of it) to allow retrieval of the offsetWidth.

For this measurement step, just make its position absolute and its x or y value a big negative, so it will render but not be visible to the user.