Is there a simple way to make html textarea and input type text equally wide?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28713

  •  09-06-2019
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Question

Is there a simple way of getting a HTML textarea and an input type="text" to render with (approximately) equal width (in pixels), that works in different browsers?

A CSS/HTML solution would be brilliant. I would prefer not to have to use Javascript.

Thanks /Erik

Was it helpful?

Solution

You should be able to use

.mywidth {
  width: 100px;   
}
<input class="mywidth">
<textarea class="mywidth"></textarea>

OTHER TIPS

To answer the first question (although it's been answered to death): A CSS width is what you need.

But I wanted to answer Gaius's question in the answers. Gaius, you're problem is that you are setting the width's in em's. This is a good think to do but you need to remember that em's are based on font size. By default an input area and a textarea have different font faces & sizes. So when you are setting the width to 35em, the input area is using the width of it's font and the textarea is using the width of it's font. The text area default font is smaller, therefore the text box is smaller. Either set the width in pixels or points, or ensure that input boxes and textareas have the same font face & size:

.mywidth {
  width: 35em;
  font-family: Verdana;
  font-size: 1em;
}
<input type="text" class="mywidth"/><br/>
<textarea class="mywidth"></textarea>

Hope that helps.

Someone else mentioned this, then deleted it. If you want to style all textareas and text inputs the same way without classes, use the following CSS (does not work in IE6):

input[type=text], textarea { width: 80%; }

This is a CSS question: the width includes the border and padding widths, which have different defaults for INPUT and TEXTAREA in different browsers, so make those the same as well:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>width</title>
<style type="text/css">
textarea, input { padding:2px; border:2px inset #ccc; width:20em; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p><input/><br/><textarea></textarea></p>
</body>
</html>

This is described in the Box dimensions section of the CSS specification, which says:

The box width is given by the sum of the left and right margins, border, and padding, and the content width.

Use CSS3 to make textbox and input work the same. See jsFiddle.

.textarea, .textbox {
    width: 200px;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
    box-sizing: border-box; 
}

Yes, there is. Try doing something like this:

<textarea style="width:80%"> </textarea>
<input type="text" style="width:80%" />

Both should equate to the same size. You can do it with absolute sizes (px), relative sizes (em) or percentage sizes.

Just a note - the width is always influenced by something happening on the client side - PHP can't effect those sorts of things.

Setting a common class on the elements and setting a width in CSS is your cleanest bet.

Use a CSS class for width, then place your elements into HTML DIVs, DIVs having the mentioned class.

This way, the layout control overall should be better.

As mentioned in Unequal Html textbox and dropdown width with XHTML 1.0 strict it also depends on your doctype. I have noticed that when using XHTML 1.0 strict, the difference in width does indeed appear.

input[type="text"] { width: 60%; } 
input[type="email"] { width: 60%; }
textarea { width: 60%; }
textarea { height: 40%; }

These days, if you use bootstrap, simply give your input fields the form-control class. Something like:

<label for="display-name">Display name</label>
<input type="text" class="form-control" name="displayname" placeholder="">

<label for="about-me">About me</label>
<textarea class="form-control" rows="5" id="about-me" name="aboutMe"></textarea>

you can also use the following CSS: 

.mywidth{
width:100px;
}
textarea{
width:100px;
}

HTML:

<input class="mywidth" >
<textarea></textarea>
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