height of page in javascript

Question

I'm unable to get the height of a page in javascript when the page is larger than the screen.

I thought this would get me the right height:

$(document).height();

but that only gets the height of the screen, same as:

$('body').height();

same as:

document.offsetHeight;

For some reason all these examples only return the height of the screen. Can somebody help?

Answer 1

Using jQuery (which you did specify), $(document).height() will return exactly what you're asking for.

To clarify the usage of the height() method:

$('.someElement').height(); // returns the calculated pixel height of the element(s)
$(window).height();         // returns height of browser viewport
$(document).height();       // returns height of HTML document

I suspect, that if $(document).height() is not working for you, something is wrong. You may be:

1. Calling it too early. Like, before the DOM is ready
2. Have some uncleared floats that are not causing some block level elements to expand to their real height. Thus messing up height calculations.
3. Have something critical absolutely positioned. Absolutely positioned elements do not contribute towards height calculations of their parent elements.