D3js: finding path's bounding box (without getBBox() )? - node.js

Question

The following code works on Chromium :
var node = window.d3.selectAll('#L1 > *:nth-child(2)');
var bbox = node.node().getBBox();
console.log(bbox) // {height: 44, width: 44, y: -13, x: 144}
but not with nodejs + jsdom:
"TypeError: Object [ PATH ] has no method 'getBBox' "
M. Bostock pointed out that JSDOM doesn't support getBBox()
What D3js replacement to use to get the bounding box of #L1 > *:nth-child(2) ?
Past efforts lead me there : getBBox() based fiddle

Answer 1

Path's bounding box
Digging straight into the element's path data d="..." should work. An svg line is basically a set of x,y points. Assuming absolute coordinates without translation nor big bezier curves, which is the case of my D3js-generated svg lines, I'am finding in this data the min and max values for both x and y.
To do so, I get the d="..." svg line or multilines code. For simplicity sake, I rudely removes possible relative jumps such h30 or v20 since I never saw any in my D3js output, then clean out letters (aka svg commands : M,L,H,V,C,S,Q,T,A,Z), simplify the spaces and line jumps, then split by the remaining spaces. I get a clean arrays of coordinates.
Important to note, my selector directly target a single non-translated path.
var getBBox = function(selector){
var xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax,p;
// clean up path
var t = d3.select(selector).attr("d"); // get svg line's code
console.log(t)
t = t.replace(/[a-z].*/g," ") // remove relative coords, could rather tag it for later processing to absolute!
.replace(/[\sA-Z]+/gi," ").trim().split(" "); // remove letters and simplify spaces.
console.log(t)
for(var i in t){ // set valid initial values
if(t[i].length>1){
p = t[i].split(",");
xmin = xmax = p[0]; ymin = ymax = p[1]; }
}
for(var i in t){ // update xmin,xmax,ymin,ymax
p = t[i].split(",");
if(!p[1]){ p[0]=xmin; p[1] = ymin;} // ignore relative jumps such h20 v-10
xmin = Math.min(xmin, p[0]);
xmax = Math.max(xmax, p[0]);
ymin = Math.min(ymin, p[1]);
ymax = Math.max(ymax, p[1]);
} return [[xmin,ymax],[xmax,ymin]]; // [[left, bottom], [right, top]] as for https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Geo-Paths#bounds
}
var bb = getBBox("path");
JSfiddle DEMO
Groups bounding boxes
For groups of multiple paths, you may want to traverse the svg DOM to loop upon each single path of the group in order to update xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax.
Translated elements
To handle translated elements, adapt further.
Alternatives
Other better approaches may exist. Remember to check if getBBox() and getBoundingClientRect() are available in your context, since they are native and very convenient.

Answer 2

The reason why getBBox/getBoundingClientRect/getClientRect does not work in NodeJS+JSDOM is that calculating these values of an SVG (or HTML) element involves massive amounts of computation.
First, all CSS code in <style> elements must be parsed (which is already not trivial). Then the CSS selectors, cascading and inheritance rules must be applied to know what size, position or line width an element has. And even after you know all style property values, you need to do some non-trivial maths to calculate the bounding boxes: definition of different SVG transform functions, compositions of these, bounding boxes of SVG primitives and Bezier curves. Browsers support all of these (they have to, in order to draw the element), but JSDOM is simply not meant for all of these.
But fortunately, canvg is a JavaScript implementation of most of SVG, which uses a <canvas> element to draw the image. It does support most of the above, and although it does not have an interface for giving you those data, fortunately it has very nice (and MIT licensed) code, so hopefully you can copy and reuse parts of it. As of now, the code is written in a single file, and it has CSS parsing, applying cascading rules, path data parsing, definitions of SVG transforms, applying transformations, and bezier curve bounding box calculation. That is, almost everything you need to calculate bounding boxes :) It does not, however, support CSS selectors, but it can reuse another library. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, canvg is not ready for running in NodeJS, you probably need some tweaks.
There is, however canvgc, an SVG to JS compiler, which contains an older version of canvg, and it is capable of running in NodeJS. So it is easier to start with that.