Question

A jQuery plugin is applying an inline style (display:block). I’m feeling lazy and want to override it with display:none.

What’s the best (lazy) way?

Answer 1

Update: while the following solution works, there’s a much easier method. See below.

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Here’s what I came up with, and I hope this comes in handy – to you or anybody else:

$('#element').attr('style', function(i, style)
{
    return style && style.replace(/display[^;]+;?/g, '');
});

This will remove that inline style.

I’m not sure this is what you wanted. You wanted to override it, which, as pointed out already, is easily done by $('#element').css('display', 'inline').

What I was looking for was a solution to REMOVE the inline style completely.
I need this for a plugin I’m writing where I have to temporarily set some inline CSS values, but want to later remove them; I want the stylesheet to take back control.
I could do it by storing all of its original values and then putting them back inline, but this solution feels much cleaner to me.

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Here it is in plugin format:

(function($)
{
    $.fn.removeStyle = function(style)
    {
        var search = new RegExp(style + '[^;]+;?', 'g');

        return this.each(function()
        {
            $(this).attr('style', function(i, style)
            {
                return style && style.replace(search, '');
            });
        });
    };
}(jQuery));

If you include this plugin in the page before your script, you can then just call

$('#element').removeStyle('display');

and that should do the trick.

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Update: I now realized that all this is futile.
You can simply set it to blank:

$('#element').css('display', '');

and it’ll automatically be removed for you.

Here’s a quote from the docs:

Setting the value of a style property to an empty string — e.g. $('#mydiv').css('color', '') — removes that property from an element if it has already been directly applied, whether in the HTML style attribute, through jQuery’s .css() method, or through direct DOM manipulation of the style property. It does not, however, remove a style that has been applied with a CSS rule in a stylesheet or <style> element.

I don’t think jQuery is doing any magic here; it seems the style object does this natively.