Trying to compare two Canvas elements

Question

I am using below code to compare two canvas elements

function createImage(html, can) {
     var canvas = $( \"#\" + can );
     var ctx = canvas[0].getCont         


        

Answer 1

About the "cross origin policy" problems

Unable to get image data from canvas because the canvas has been tainted by cross-origin data. SECURITY_ERR: DOM Exception 18

It's a security issue caused by the navigator "cross origin policy".

---

This error will appear if you have "dirtied" your canvas. This is done by drawing images to the canvas that are from a different origin. For instance, if your canvas is hosted at www.example.com, and you use images from www.wikipedia.org, then your canvas origin-clean flag is set to false internally.

Once the origin-clean flag is set to false, you are no longer allowed to call toDataURL or getImageData

---

Technically, images are of the same origin if domains, protocols, and ports match.

---

If you are working locally (file://) then any image drawn will set off the flag. This makes debugging annoying, but with Chrome you can start it with the flag --allow-file-access-from-files to allow this.

---

To learn more read the article: "Understanding the HTML5 Canvas image security rules".

Credits to Simon Sarris

My files are in the same domain or the chrome flag is activated and I still get this error, what's happening?

The problem is that Chrome (currently) always taints a canvas when an SVG document is drawn to it.

For a more detailed explanation see the question below:

Rasterizing an in-document SVG to Canvas

Ok, the use of svg seems to be the problem, so how to fix it?

At the time of my writing Antony answered it!

See his answer.

Answer 2

The reason you get a cross-origin error is because of the use of <svg> with namespace declarations located at http://www.w3.org/, which is of a different origin:

var data = "<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' width='1000' height='1000'>" +
             "<foreignObject width='100%' height='100%'>" +
               "<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>" +
                    html +
               "</div>" +
             "</foreignObject>" +
           "</svg>";

I can tell this method is the one from Drawing DOM objects into a canvas on MDN.

When you re-access the data this way,

var ctx1 = a1.getContext('2d');
var imageData = ctx1.getImageData(0, 0, a1.width, a1.height);

you will hit the error:

Unable to get image data from canvas because the canvas has been tainted by cross-origin data.

You can test this on Chrome:

• Your original version with the error
• Another version with namespace declarations removed, which does not throw an error and is at the same time blank due to the absence of namespace declarations

You can only return the data from the function to avoid getting this error. But because of the asynchronous nature of img.onload,

img.onload = function () {
    ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
    DOMURL.revokeObjectURL(url);
};

you have to defer the retrieval of data, forcing you to re-access the data out of the function and causing the error.

Thus, you should use an alternate method of building the canvas with DOM objects that does not rely on <svg>, like html2canvas.

function createImage(html) {
    var dfd = new $.Deferred();
    var el = document.createElement("div");
        el.innerHTML = html;
        el.style.display = 'inline-block';
        document.body.appendChild(el);
    html2canvas(el, {
      onrendered: function(canvas) {
          document.body.appendChild(canvas);
          document.body.removeChild(el);
          dfd.resolve(canvas.toDataURL());
      }
    });
    return dfd;
}
$.when(
    createImage("<span style='font-size:34px'><i><b>Hello</b></i></span>"), 
    createImage("<span style='font-size:34px'><i><b>Hello</b></i></span>")
).done(function(a1, a2){
   if (a1 === a2) {
      alert("Match"); 
   }
});

See DEMO.