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Two cool ways to center content in CSS

You may have seen this question, center a div, or whatever, in interviews or other places. I am sure there are other approaches than I am sharing here, but I found these two cool ideas from multiple places (see refs at the end). These are not my original ideas so I will be sure to share where I learned these from:

 

Using display:flex

 Make sure you know how flex works, but to do centering with flex, it's ridiculously simple:

div.container {
display: flex;
justify-content: center; /* horizontal alignment */
align-items: center; /* vertical alignment */
flex-direction: column; /* since we are doing a vertical column */
padding: 1rem 3rem; /* not related to centering */
}

 Now everything inside <div class="container"> </div> will be centered in both directions!


Using display:grid 

You are so going to thank for me this one, you are welcome. This one is so simple it does not even need an explanation does it?

 
div.container {
display: grid;
place-items: center;
padding: 1rem 3rem;
} 


Try it out in CodePen, Codesandbox or whatever tool you use to do your CSS/JS stuff!

Where I learned these from:

[1] A wonderful compilation of one liner CSS tricks! https://web.dev/one-line-layouts/

[2] The wonderful book CSS in Depth By Keith J. Grant. It's wonderful to read CSS from a book, for a change.

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