How to get bounding box for div element in jQuery

Question

I want to calculate bounding box for div element via jQuery/JavaScript.

I tried like this:

//Left side of box  document.getElementById("myElement").offsetLeft;  //Top side of box  document.getElementById("myElement").offsetTop;   //Right side of box document.getElementById("myElement").offsetLeft + document.getElementById("myElement").offsetWidth;  //Bottom side of box  document.getElementById("myElement").offsetTop + document.getElementById("myElement").offsetHeight;  

It returns some values. whether it is correct way to get bounding box for div element via jQuery / JavaScript.

I need something like getBBox() method in SVG element. it will return x, y, width and height of an element. Sameway how can I get bounding box for div element?

Answer 1

As this is specifically tagged for jQuery -

$("#myElement")[0].getBoundingClientRect(); 

or

$("#myElement").get(0).getBoundingClientRect(); 

(These are functionally identical, in some older browsers .get() was slightly faster)

Note that if you try to get the values via jQuery calls then it will not take into account any css transform values, which can give unexpected results...

Note 2: In jQuery 3.0 it has changed to using the proper getBoundingClientRect() calls for its own dimension calls (see the jQuery Core 3.0 Upgrade Guide) - which means that the other jQuery answers will finally always be correct - but only when using the new jQuery version - hence why it's called a breaking change...

Answer 2

You can get the bounding box of any element by calling getBoundingClientRect

var rect = document.getElementById("myElement").getBoundingClientRect(); 

That will return an object with left, top, width and height fields.