Peterbe.com

I've recently improved the IssueTrackerProduct so that when you start to write in the little textarea it expands and grows vertically as the text gets larger and larger. Other sites like Highrise do this too for note taking.

Long story short, here's the demo and here's the solution:

function _getNoLines(element) {
  var hardlines = element.value.split('\n');
  var total = hardlines.length;
  for (var i=0, len=hardlines.length; i<len; i++) {
     total += Math.max(Math.round(hardlines[i].length / element.cols), 1) - 1;
  }
  return total;
}

$(function() {

  // First, for all the textareas that have lots of lines of text 
  // in them, we want to double their number of rows
  $('textarea.autoexpanding').each(function() {
     while (_getNoLines(this) > parseInt(this.rows))
       this.rows = '' + Math.round((parseInt(this.rows) * 1.5));
  });

  // When a user enters new lines, if they have entered more
  // lines than the textarea has rows, then double the textareas rows
  $('textarea.autoexpanding').bind('keyup', function() {
     if (_getNoLines(this) > parseInt(this.rows))
       this.rows = '' + Math.round((parseInt(this.rows) * 1.5));
  });

}

I knew had I heard it before but I must have completely missed it anyway and forgotten to test my new Javascript widget in IE. None of the stylesheet worked in IE and it didn't make any sense. Here's how I did it first:

var closer = document.createElement('a');
a.setAttribute('style', 'float:left; font-weight:bold');
a.onclick = function() { ...

That worked in Firefox of course but not in IE. The reason is that apparently IE doesn't support this. This brilliant page says that IE is "incomplete" on setAttribute(). Microsoft sucked again! Let's now focus on the workaround I put in place.

First I created a function to would take "font-weight:bold;..." as input and convert that to "element.style.fontWeight='bold'" etc:

function rzCC(s){
  // thanks http://www.ruzee.com/blog/2006/07/\
  // retrieving-css-styles-via-javascript/
  for(var exp=/-([a-z])/; 
      exp.test(s); 
      s=s.replace(exp,RegExp.$1.toUpperCase()));
  return s;
}

function _setStyle(element, declaration) {
  if (declaration.charAt(declaration.length-1)==';')
    declaration = declaration.slice(0, -1);
  var k, v;
  var splitted = declaration.split(';');
  for (var i=0, len=splitted.length; i<len; i++) {
     k = rzCC(splitted[i].split(':')[0]);
     v = splitted[i].split(':')[1];
     eval("element.style."+k+"='"+v+"'");

  }
}

I hate having to use eval() but I couldn't think of another way of doing it. Anybody?

Anyhow, now using it is done like this:

var closer = document.createElement('a');
//a.setAttribute('style', 'float:left; font-weight:bold');
_setStyle(a, 'float:left; font-weight:bold');
a.onclick = function() { ...

and it works in IE!