Calculating text width

Question

I\'m trying to calculate text width using jQuery. I\'m not sure what, but I am definitely doing something wrong.

So, here is the code:

var c = $(\'.c         


        

Answer 1

Neither Rune's nor Brain's was working for me in case when the element that was holding the text had fixed width. I did something similar to Okamera. It uses less selectors.

EDIT: It won't probably work for elements that uses relative font-size, as following code inserts htmlCalc element into body thus looses the information about parents relation.

$.fn.textWidth = function() {
    var htmlCalc = $('' + this.html() + '');
    htmlCalc.css('font-size', this.css('font-size'))
            .hide()
            .prependTo('body');
    var width = htmlCalc.width();
    htmlCalc.remove();
    return width;
};