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

Answer 1

If you know the element to be the full width of a parent element another approach is to create a recursive method:

es5:

var getWidth;
getWidth = function($el){
  return $el.offsetWidth || getWidth($el.parentElement);
}
var width = getWidth(document.getElementById('the-element'));

es6:

let getWidth
getWidth = ($el) => $el.offsetWidth || getWidth($el.parentElement)

const width = getWidth(document.getElementById('the-element'))