How to clear the canvas for redrawing

Question

After experimenting with composite operations and drawing images on the canvas I\'m now trying to remove images and compositing. How do I do this?

I need to clear th

Answer 1

• Chrome responds well to: context.clearRect ( x , y , w , h ); as suggested by @Pentium10 but IE9 seems to completely ignore this instruction.
• IE9 seems to respond to: canvas.width = canvas.width; but it doesn't clear lines, just shapes, pictures and other objects unless you also use @John Allsopp's solution of first changing the width.

So if you have a canvas and context created like this:

var canvas = document.getElementById('my-canvas');
var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

You can use a method like this:

function clearCanvas(context, canvas) {
  context.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
  var w = canvas.width;
  canvas.width = 1;
  canvas.width = w;
}