Window: getComputedStyle() method

The Window.getComputedStyle() method returns an object containing the values of all CSS properties of an element, after applying active stylesheets and resolving any basic computation those values may contain.

Individual CSS property values are accessed through APIs provided by the returned CSSStyleDeclaration object, or by indexing with CSS property names. The values returned by getComputedStyle are resolved values.

Syntax

getComputedStyle(element)
getComputedStyle(element, pseudoElt)

Parameters

element

The Element for which to get the computed style.

pseudoElt Optional

A string specifying the pseudo-element to match. Omitted (or null) for real elements.

Return value

A live CSSStyleDeclaration object, which updates automatically when the element's styles are changed.

Note that:

• The returned CSSStyleDeclaration object contains active values for CSS property longhand names as well as shorthand names. For example, the returned object contains entries for border-bottom-width in addition to the border-width and border shorthand property names.
• Returned values are sometimes deliberately inaccurate. To avoid the "CSS History Leak" security issue, browsers may lie about the computed styles for a visited link, returning values as if the user never visited the linked URL. See Plugging the CSS history leak and Privacy-related changes coming to CSS :visited for examples of how this is implemented.
• During CSS transitions, getComputedStyle returns the original property value in Firefox, but the final property value in WebKit.
• In Firefox, properties with the value auto return the used value, not the value auto. So if you apply top:auto and bottom:0 on an element with height:30px and a containing block of height:100px, Firefox's computed style for top returns 70px, as 100 − 30 = 70.
• For compatibility reasons, serialized color values are expressed as rgb() colors if the alpha channel value is exactly 1, and rgba() colors otherwise. In both cases, legacy syntax is used, with commas as separators (for example rgb(255, 0, 0)).

The returned object is the same CSSStyleDeclaration type as the object returned from the element's style property. However, the two objects have different purposes:

• The object from getComputedStyle is read-only, and should be used to inspect the element's style — including those set by a <style> element or an external stylesheet.
• The element.style object should be used to set styles on that element, or inspect styles directly added to it from JavaScript manipulation or the global style attribute.

Exceptions

TypeError

If the passed object is not an Element or the pseudoElt is not a valid pseudo-element selector or is ::part() or ::slotted().

Note: Valid pseudo-element selector refers to syntactic validity, e.g., ::unsupported is considered valid, even though the pseudo-element itself is not supported.

Examples

Retrieving computed styles

In this example we style a <p> element, then retrieve those styles using getComputedStyle(), and print them into the text content of the <p>.

HTML

<p>Hello</p>

CSS

p {
  width: 400px;
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 20px;
  font: 2rem/2 sans-serif;
  text-align: center;
  background: purple;
  color: white;
}

JavaScript

const para = document.querySelector("p");
const compStyles = window.getComputedStyle(para);
para.textContent =
  `My computed font-size is ${compStyles.getPropertyValue("font-size")},\n` +
  `and my computed line-height is ${compStyles.getPropertyValue(
    "line-height",
  )}.`;

Result

Use with pseudo-elements

getComputedStyle can pull style info from pseudo-elements, such as ::after, ::before, ::marker, or ::line-marker.

<h3>Generated content</h3>

h3::after {
  content: " rocks!";
}

const h3 = document.querySelector("h3");
const result = getComputedStyle(h3, "::after").content;

console.log("the generated content is: ", result); // returns ' rocks!'

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• window.getDefaultComputedStyle()
• getPropertyValue()
• Element.computedStyleMap()
• Resolved value