Creating a textarea with auto-resize

height, html, javascript, resize, textarea

Solution

This works for me (Firefox 3.6/4.0 and Chrome 10/11):

var observe;
if (window.attachEvent) {
    observe = function (element, event, handler) {
        element.attachEvent('on'+event, handler);
    };
}
else {
    observe = function (element, event, handler) {
        element.addEventListener(event, handler, false);
    };
}
function init () {
    var text = document.getElementById('text');
    function resize () {
        text.style.height = 'auto';
        text.style.height = text.scrollHeight+'px';
    }
    /* 0-timeout to get the already changed text */
    function delayedResize () {
        window.setTimeout(resize, 0);
    }
    observe(text, 'change',  resize);
    observe(text, 'cut',     delayedResize);
    observe(text, 'paste',   delayedResize);
    observe(text, 'drop',    delayedResize);
    observe(text, 'keydown', delayedResize);

    text.focus();
    text.select();
    resize();
}

textarea {
    border: 0 none white;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding: 0;
    outline: none;
    background-color: #D0D0D0;
}

<body onload="init();">
<textarea rows="1" style="height:1em;" id="text"></textarea>
</body>

If you want try it on jsfiddle It starts with a single line and grows only the exact amount necessary. It is ok for a single `textarea`, but I wanted to write something where I would have many many many such `textarea`s (about as much as one would normally have lines in a large text document). In that case it is really slow. (In Firefox it's insanely slow.) So I really would like an approach that uses pure CSS. This would be possible with `contenteditable`, but I want it to be plaintext-only.

Problem

There was another thread about this, which I've tried. But there is one problem: the `textarea` doesn't shrink if you delete the content. I can't find any way to shrink it to the correct size - the `clientHeight` value comes back as the full size of the `textarea`, not its contents. The code from that page is below: ``` function FitToContent(id, maxHeight) { var text = id && id.style ? id : document.getElementById(id); if ( !text ) return; var adjustedHeight = text.clientHeight; if ( !maxHeight || maxHeight > adjustedHeight ) { adjustedHeight = Math.max(text.scrollHeight, adjustedHeight); if ( maxHeight ) adjustedHeight = Math.min(maxHeight, adjustedHeight); if ( adjustedHeight > text.clientHeight ) text.style.height = adjustedHeight + "px"; } } window.onload = function() { document.getElementById("ta").onkeyup = function() { FitToContent( this, 500 ) }; } ```

Original source

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