title: Trying to find the width of hidden content in order to resize the containing div to show the content (jQuery)
body: <p>I am trying to create a resizing container that will "grow" on $('element').hover, but I only want to do so when the content in the LI is to wide and hidden due to a css overlow:hidden. I can't seem to find a way to find the total widht of the hidden content. For example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;ul id="innerContainer"&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="/Afrikaans/index.html"&gt;Afrikaans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="/Arabic/index.html"&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="/Chinese/index.html"&gt;Chinese (Mandarin) What The Its Just Crazy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;/ul&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The li containing the Chinese (Mandarin)... is too wide to fit in the 172px wide container.
  I want to be able to find out the width on .hover() so I can resize the container to fit. I need it to be dynamic because the li that is too wide will not always conatin the same content. CSS is :</p>
  
  <pre><code>#innerContainer {position:absolute; left:0; top:0; height:200px; overflow:hidden;}
  #scroller ul {margin:0; padding:0; list-style:none;width:172px;}
  #scroller ul li {float:left; height:27px; width:172px;}
  #scroller ul li a {overflow:hidden;display:block; float:left; height:26px; line-height:26px; width:172px; font-size:11px; color:#000; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; text-indent:5px; border-bottom:1px solid #000;}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>All i can get is the actual width which is 172px.</p>
  
  <p>Take into consideration that the items are already in a vertically scrollable container.
  An example of this in action is at <a href="http://www.pronunciator.com/Vietnamese/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pronunciator.com/Vietnamese/index.html</a>
  You can see how the rows in the menu that are too wide overflow into the next line. I killed that by using overflow:hidden. Now i need to find the width of the line of hidden text.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for any replies.</p>