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...

Answer 1

The width of an element that has CSS visibility: hidden is measurable. It's only when it's display: none that it's not rendered at all. So if it's certain the elements are going to be absolutely-positioned (so they don't cause a layout change when displayed), simply use css('visibility', 'hidden') to hide your element instead of hide() and you should be OK measuring the width.

Otherwise, yes, show-measure-hide does work.