Can jQuery get all CSS styles associated with an element?

Question

Is there a way in jQuery to get all CSS from an existing element and apply it to another without listing them all?

I know it would work if they were a style attribut

Answer 1

A couple years late, but here is a solution that retrieves both inline styling and external styling:

function css(a) {
    var sheets = document.styleSheets, o = {};
    for (var i in sheets) {
        var rules = sheets[i].rules || sheets[i].cssRules;
        for (var r in rules) {
            if (a.is(rules[r].selectorText)) {
                o = $.extend(o, css2json(rules[r].style), css2json(a.attr('style')));
            }
        }
    }
    return o;
}

function css2json(css) {
    var s = {};
    if (!css) return s;
    if (css instanceof CSSStyleDeclaration) {
        for (var i in css) {
            if ((css[i]).toLowerCase) {
                s[(css[i]).toLowerCase()] = (css[css[i]]);
            }
        }
    } else if (typeof css == "string") {
        css = css.split("; ");
        for (var i in css) {
            var l = css[i].split(": ");
            s[l[0].toLowerCase()] = (l[1]);
        }
    }
    return s;
}

Pass a jQuery object into css() and it will return an object, which you can then plug back into jQuery's $().css(), ex:

var style = css($("#elementToGetAllCSS"));
$("#elementToPutStyleInto").css(style);

:)