Compute a DOM element’s effective background colour

While working on a new JS library today, I wanted to create a menu overlay element that automatically has the same background colour as its trigger element.

For some context, the basic structure looks like this:

Basic element structure

Over-the-top colours added to highlight element structure

My first thought was to just use <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window.getComputedStyle">getComputedStyle()</a> and read the backgroundColor property of the trigger. This works only if the trigger element itself has a background style.

Of course, if the background styles are set on a container element higher up the DOM tree, that method is a great big ball of uselessness. The problem is that the trigger element reports its background colour as being transparent (which is correct, but still annoying for my purpose).

My solution was to walk up the DOM tree until an element with a background colour is found:

function getBackgroundColour(elem, limitElem) {
  var bgColour = '';
  var styleElem = elem;
  var rTrans = /^transparent|rgba\(0, 0, 0, 0\)$/;
  var style;
  limitElem || (limitElem = document.body);
  while (!bgColour && styleElem !== limitElem.parentNode) {
    style = getComputedStyle(styleElem);
    if (!rTrans.test(style.backgroundColor)) {
      bgColour = style.backgroundColor;
    }
    styleElem = styleElem.parentNode;
  }
  return bgColour;
}

Notes

  • Different browsers return either “transparent” or “rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)” for a transparent background, so I had to make sure to account for both.
  • The limitElem parameter is there as a short-circuit, in case you only want to check within a certain container element rather than bubbling all the way up to document.body.
  • getComputedStyle() doesn’t work in IE8, but I wasn’t planning on making my library work in IE8 anyway. An equivalent API for that browser is element.currentStyle.
  • This behaviour assumes that there aren’t any funky absolute positioning tricks happening that make the child elements appear outside their parent container.

Why am I blogging about this seemly simple technique? Because I searched for a solution first and found bugger all, that’s why.

And before anyone asks: No, using jQuery will not help – it just defers to getComputedStyle() anyway.