Based off of work by Neil Jenkins that can be seen here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/expanding-text-areas-made-elegant/
Start with markup like this:
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js"></script>
<script src='PATH/TO/expanding.js'></script>
<textarea class='expanding'></textarea>
And that's it. The plugin finds textareas with the expanding class on page load and initializes them for you. These textareas will automatically resize now as the user changes the value.
If you'd like to change the initial selector to grab ALL textareas on load, you can change this property:
$.expanding.initialSelector = "textarea";
If you would prefer to initialize the textareas on your own, do something like this:
<script type='text/javascript'>
$("#element").expanding();
</script>
If you'd like to change the value by code and have it resize manually, you can do:
$('textarea').val('New\nValue!').change()
There aren't any options needed for this plugin. If your textarea has certain attributes, the plugin will handle them gracefully.
<textarea wrap=off></text>: wrapping will not happen, but if a newline is entered the height will be updated.<textarea rows=10></text>: The plugin respects the rows attribute, adjusting the clone's min height accordingly.
$("#element").expanding({
update: function() {
// Textarea has been updated, size may have changed.
}
});
Once attached, the expanding behaviour can be removed as follows:
$("#element").expanding('destroy');
To test whether a jQuery selection has expanding behaviour:
$("#element").expanding('active'); // -> boolean
Note: this behaves like .hasClass(): it will return true if any of the nodes in the selection have expanding behaviour.
Plugin styles can be refreshed as follows:
$(".element").expanding('refresh');
This should be called after expanding textarea styles are updated, or box model dimensions are changed.
The plugin creates a textarea clone with identical dimensions to that of the original. It therefore requires that the textarea be in place in the DOM for these dimensions to be correct. Calling expanding() on a textarea outside the DOM will have no effect.
You can style things how you'd like for the textarea, and they will automatically be copied over to the invisible pre tag, with the exception of margins (which are reset to 0, to ensure that the clone maintains the correct size and positioning).
Flash of unstyled content (FOUC) can be avoided by adding the following styles to your stylesheet (adjust the selector if necessary):
textarea.expanding {
margin: 0;
-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
box-sizing: border-box;
width: 100%;
}
By default, the textarea will behave like a block-level element: its width will expand to fill its container. To restrict the textarea width, simply apply a width declaration to a parent element e.g. the textarea wrapper:
.expanding-wrapper {
width: 50%;
}
See the demo to see the plugin in action.
This has been checked in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE8, and mobile Safari and it works in all of them.
See the original article for a great explanation of how this technique works.
The plugin will automatically find this textarea, and turn it into an expanding one. The final (generated) markup will look something like this:
<div class="expanding-wrapper">
<textarea class="expanding"></textarea>
<pre class="expanding-clone"><div></div></pre>
</div>
The way it works is that as the user types, the text content is copied into the div inside the pre (which is actually providing the height of the textarea). So it could look like this:
<div class="expanding-wrapper">
<textarea class="expanding">Some Content\nWas Entered</textarea>
<pre class="expanding-clone"><div>Some Content
Was Entered</div></pre>
</div>
Browser: open test/index.html
Command line: make sure you have installed node.js, and grunt-cli, then run:
$ npm install
Followed by:
$ grunt test
View tests online at: https://travis-ci.org/bgrins/ExpandingTextareas.
