How do I get the coordinates of a mouse click on a canvas element?

Question

What\'s the simplest way to add a click event handler to a canvas element that will return the x and y coordinates of the click (relative to the canvas element)?

No

Answer 1

First, as others have said, you need a function to get the position of the canvas element. Here's a method that's a little more elegant than some of the others on this page (IMHO). You can pass it any element and get its position in the document:

function findPos(obj) {
    var curleft = 0, curtop = 0;
    if (obj.offsetParent) {
        do {
            curleft += obj.offsetLeft;
            curtop += obj.offsetTop;
        } while (obj = obj.offsetParent);
        return { x: curleft, y: curtop };
    }
    return undefined;
}

Now calculate the current position of the cursor relative to that:

$('#canvas').mousemove(function(e) {
    var pos = findPos(this);
    var x = e.pageX - pos.x;
    var y = e.pageY - pos.y;
    var coordinateDisplay = "x=" + x + ", y=" + y;
    writeCoordinateDisplay(coordinateDisplay);
});

Notice that I've separated the generic findPos function from the event handling code. (As it should be. We should try to keep our functions to one task each.)

The values of offsetLeft and offsetTop are relative to offsetParent, which could be some wrapper div node (or anything else, for that matter). When there is no element wrapping the canvas they're relative to the body, so there is no offset to subtract. This is why we need to determine the position of the canvas before we can do anything else.

Similary, e.pageX and e.pageY give the position of the cursor relative to the document. That's why we subtract the canvas's offset from those values to arrive at the true position.

An alternative for positioned elements is to directly use the values of e.layerX and e.layerY. This is less reliable than the method above for two reasons:

1. These values are also relative to the entire document when the event does not take place inside a positioned element
2. They are not part of any standard