HTMLTableColElement: span property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The span read-only property of the HTMLTableColElement interface represents the number of columns this <col> or <colgroup> must span; this lets the column occupy space across multiple columns of the table. It reflects the span attribute.

Value

A positive number representing the number of columns.

Note: When setting a new value, the value is clamped to the nearest strictly positive number (up to 1000).

Examples

This example provides two buttons to modify the column span of the first cell of the body.

HTML

html

<table>
  <colgroup>
    <col />
    <col span="2" class="multiColumn" />
  </colgroup>
  <thead>
    <th></th>
    <th scope="col">C1</th>
    <th scope="col">C2</th>
    <th scope="col">C3</th>
    <th scope="col">C4</th>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th scope="row">Row 1</th>
      <td>cell</td>
      <td>cell</td>
      <td>cell</td>
      <td>cell</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
<button id="increase">Increase column span</button>
<button id="decrease">Decrease column span</button>
<div>The first &lt;col&gt; spans <output>2</output> actual column(s).</div>

table {
  border-collapse: collapse;
}

th,
td,
table {
  border: 1px solid black;
}

button {
  margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;
}

CSS

css

.multiColumn {
  background-color: #d7d9f2;
}

JavaScript

// Obtain relevant interface elements
const col = document.querySelectorAll("col")[1];
const output = document.querySelectorAll("output")[0];

const increaseButton = document.getElementById("increase");
const decreaseButton = document.getElementById("decrease");

increaseButton.addEventListener("click", () => {
  col.span = col.span + 1;

  // Update the display
  output.textContent = col.span;
});

decreaseButton.addEventListener("click", () => {
  col.span = col.span - 1;

  // Update the display
  output.textContent = col.span;
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # dom-colgroup-span

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser