Javascript color gradient

Question

Using javascript with or without Jquery, I need to a create a gradient of colours based on a start and finish color. Is this possible to do programmatically?

The end colour is only ever going to be darker shade of the start colour and it's for an unordered list which I have no control over the number of li items. I'm looking for a solution that allows me to pick a start and end color, convert the hex value into RGB so it can be manipulated in code. The starting RGB values gets incremented by a step value calculated based upon the number of items.

so if the list had 8 items then the it needs to increment the seperate Red Green Blue values in 8 steps to achieve the final colour. Is there a better way to do it and if so where can I find some sample code?

Thanks in advanced

Answer 1

Yes, absolutely.

I do this in Java, should be fairly simple to do in JavaScript too.

First, you'll need to break the colors up into RGB components.

Then calculate the differences between start and finish of the components.

Finally, calculate percentage difference and multiply by the start color of each component, then add it to the start color.

Assuming you can get the RGB values, this should do it:

var diffRed = endColor.red - startColor.red;
var diffGreen = endColor.green - startColor.green;
var diffBlue = endColor.blue - startColor.blue;

diffRed = (diffRed * percentFade) + startColor.red;
diffGreen = (diffGreen * percentFade) + startColor.green;
diffBlue = (diffBlue * percentFade) + startColor.blue;

The "percentFade" is a floating decimal, signifying how far to fade into the "endColor". 1 would be a full fade (thus creating the end color). 0 would be no fade (the starting color).

Answer 2

You can retrieve the list of elements. I'm not familiar with jQuery, but prototypejs has Element.childElements() which will return an array. Once you know the length of the array, you can determine how much to change the pixel components for each step. Some of the following code I haven't tested out in the form I'm presenting it in, but it should hopefully give you an idea.

function hex (c) {
  var s = "0123456789abcdef";
  var i = parseInt (c);
  if (i == 0 || isNaN (c))
    return "00";
  i = Math.round (Math.min (Math.max (0, i), 255));
  return s.charAt ((i - i % 16) / 16) + s.charAt (i % 16);
}

/* Convert an RGB triplet to a hex string */
function convertToHex (rgb) {
  return hex(rgb[0]) + hex(rgb[1]) + hex(rgb[2]);
}

/* Remove '#' in color hex string */
function trim (s) { return (s.charAt(0) == '#') ? s.substring(1, 7) : s }

/* Convert a hex string to an RGB triplet */
function convertToRGB (hex) {
  var color[];
  color[0] = parseInt ((trim(hex)).substring (0, 2), 16);
  color[1] = parseInt ((trim(hex)).substring (2, 4), 16);
  color[2] = parseInt ((trim(hex)).substring (4, 6), 16);
}


/* The start of your code. */
var start = convertToRGB ('#000000');    /* The beginning of your gradient */
var end   = convertToRGB ('#ffffff');    /* The end of your gradient */
var arr = $('.gradientList').childElements();
var len = arr.length();                  /* The number of colors to compute */
var alpha = 0.5;                         /* Alpha blending amount */

for (i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    var c = [];

    c[0] = start[0] * alpha + (1 - alpha) * end[0];
    c[1] = start[1] * alpha + (1 - alpha) * end[1];
    c[2] = start[2] * alpha + (1 - alpha) * end[2];

    /* Set the background color of this element */
    arr[i].setStyle ({ 'background-color': convertToHex (c) });
}