jQuery: Get height of hidden element in jQuery

Question

I need to get height of an element that is within a div that is hidden. Right now I show the div, get the height, and hide the parent div. This seems a bit silly. Is there a

Answer 1

If you've already displayed the element on the page previously, you can simply take the height directly from the DOM element (reachable in jQuery with .get(0)), since it is set even when the element is hidden:

$('.hidden-element').get(0).height;

same for the width:

$('.hidden-element').get(0).width;

(thanks to Skeets O'Reilly for correction)