How to get the scroll position of an element in JavaScript

When you are building a user interface in the browser, you might have an element which can be scrolled, and it's a common need to know the horizontal and vertical scrolling it currently has.

Published Dec 01 2018

How can you do that?

Once you have the element, you can inspect its scrollLeft and scrollTop properties.

The 0, 0 position is always found in the top left corner, so any scrolling is relative to that.

Example:

const container = document.querySelector('. container')
container.scrollTop
container.scrollLeft

Those properties are read/write, so you can also set the scroll position:

const container = document.querySelector('. container')
container.scrollTop = 1000
container.scrollLeft = 1000