textarea's rows, and cols attribute in CSS

Question

I\'d like to set the textarea\'s rows and cols attributes via CSS.

How would I do this in CSS?

Answer 1

I just wanted to post a demo using calc() for setting rows/height, since no one did.

body {
  /* page default */
  font-size: 15px;
  line-height: 1.5;
}

textarea {
  /* demo related */
  width: 300px;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
  display: block;
  
  /* rows related */
  font-size: inherit;
  line-height: inherit;
  padding: 3px;
}

textarea.border-box {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

textarea.rows-5 {
  /* height: calc(font-size * line-height * rows); */
  height: calc(1em * 1.5 * 5);
}

textarea.border-box.rows-5 {
  /* height: calc(font-size * line-height * rows + padding-top + padding-bottom + border-top-width + border-bottom-width); */
  height: calc(1em * 1.5 * 5 + 3px + 3px + 1px + 1px);
}

height is 2 rows by default

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height is 5 now

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

border-box height is 5 now

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

If you use large values for the paddings (e.g. greater than 0.5em), you'll start to see the text that overflows the content(-box) area, and that might lead you to think that the height is not exactly x rows (that you set), but it is. To understand what's going on, you might want to check out The box model and box-sizing pages.