Get a pixel from HTML Canvas?

Question

Is it possible to query a HTML Canvas object to get the color at a specific location?

Answer 1

Yes sure, provided you have its context. (See how to get canvas context here.)

var imgData = context.getImageData(0,0,canvas.width,canvas.height);
// { data: [r,g,b,a,r,g,b,a,r,g,..], ... }

function getPixel(imgData, index) {
  var i = index*4, d = imgData.data;
  return [d[i],d[i+1],d[i+2],d[i+3]] // Returns array [R,G,B,A]
}

// AND/OR

function getPixelXY(imgData, x, y) {
  return getPixel(imgData, y*imgData.width+x);
}

---

PS: If you plan to mutate the data and draw them back on the canvas, you can use subarray

var
  idt = imgData, // See previous code snippet
  a = getPixel(idt, 188411), // Array(4) [0, 251, 0, 255]
  b = idt.data.subarray(188411*4, 188411*4 + 4) // Uint8ClampedArray(4) [0, 251, 0, 255]

a[0] = 255 // Does nothing
getPixel(idt, 188411), // Array(4) [0, 251, 0, 255]

b[0] = 255 // Mutates the original imgData.data
getPixel(idt, 188411), // Array(4) [255, 251, 0, 255]

// Or use it in the function
function getPixel(imgData, index) {
  var i = index*4, d = imgData.data;
  return imgData.data.subarray(index, index+4) // Returns subarray [R,G,B,A]
}

You can experiment with this on http://qry.me/xyscope/, the code for this is in the source, just copy/paste it in the console.