Getting Div to Occupy Full Cell Height

Make a DIV fill an entire table cell

The following code works on IE 8, IE 8's IE 7 compatibility mode, and Chrome (not tested elsewhere):

<table style="width:100px"> <!-- Not actually necessary; just makes the example text shorter -->
   <tr><td>test</td><td>test</td></tr>
   <tr>
      <td style="padding:0;">
         <div style="height:100%; width:100%; background-color:#abc; position:relative;">
            <img style="left:90px; position:absolute;" src="../Content/Images/attachment.png"/>
            test of really long content that causes the height of the cell to increase dynamically
         </div>
      </td>
      <td>test</td>
   </tr>
</table>

You said in your original question that setting width and height to 100% didn't work, though, which makes me suspect that there is some other rule overriding it. Did you check the computed style in Chrome or Firebug to see if the width/height rules were really being applied?

Edit

How foolish I am! The div was sizing to the text, not to the td. You can fix this on Chrome by making the div display:inline-block, but it doesn't work on IE. That's proving trickier...

How do I make a div fill an entire table cell?

have you tried changing css to:

#centerCell{
    border: 1px solid black;
    height:100%;
}

seems to work for me on edge, firefox and chrome

Make a div fill the height of the remaining screen space

2015 update: the flexbox approach

There are two other answers briefly mentioning flexbox; however, that was more than two years ago, and they don't provide any examples. The specification for flexbox has definitely settled now.

Note: Though CSS Flexible Boxes Layout specification is at the Candidate Recommendation stage, not all browsers have implemented it. WebKit implementation must be prefixed with -webkit-; Internet Explorer implements an old version of the spec, prefixed with -ms-; Opera 12.10 implements the latest version of the spec, unprefixed. See the compatibility table on each property for an up-to-date compatibility status.

(taken from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Flexible_boxes)

All major browsers and IE11+ support Flexbox. For IE 10 or older, you can use the FlexieJS shim.

To check current support you can also see here:
http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

Working example

With flexbox you can easily switch between any of your rows or columns either having fixed dimensions, content-sized dimensions or remaining-space dimensions. In my example I have set the header to snap to its content (as per the OPs question), I've added a footer to show how to add a fixed-height region and then set the content area to fill up the remaining space.

html,body {  height: 100%;  margin: 0;}
.box {  display: flex;  flex-flow: column;  height: 100%;}
.box .row {  border: 1px dotted grey;}
.box .row.header {  flex: 0 1 auto;  /* The above is shorthand for:  flex-grow: 0,  flex-shrink: 1,  flex-basis: auto  */}
.box .row.content {  flex: 1 1 auto;}
.box .row.footer {  flex: 0 1 40px;}

<!-- Obviously, you could use HTML5 tags like `header`, `footer` and `section` -->
<div class="box">  <div class="row header">    <p><b>header</b>      <br />      <br />(sized to content)</p>  </div>  <div class="row content">    <p>      <b>content</b>      (fills remaining space)    </p>  </div>  <div class="row footer">    <p><b>footer</b> (fixed height)</p>  </div></div>

Make div height 100% in a table cell

If you only need the background color to cover the entire cell, you can just set it on the td rather than div.

td:last-child {
  background-color: green;
}

If you really need to make the div to cover the cell, you can try using the position tricks. Note, this approach only works when there is less data in the second cell.

td {
  position: relative;
}
td:last-child div {
  background-color: green;
  width:100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  left: 0;
  top: 0;
}

jsFiddle

Make a div fill up the entire width and height of a table cell with unspecified dimensions

After trying many things it seems that as of 2020 stretching a div to fill all the available space of a table cell without JavaScript is not possible unless you use absolute/relative positioning.

The downside with absolute positioning is that the cell does not expand with the content inside it and even not expanded the table cell seems to break on mobile ( tested with an iphoneXS on IOS14 )

dev-sbx.github.io/x

Sample Image

The only real solution here seems to be using a CSS Grid layout opposed to an HTML table.

How to make a div occupy the full height of td

Two things:

1.) Add ´box-sizing: border-box;´as a general rule (* selector) (if you want to see the red border on all four sides of the cell)

2.) Add padding: 0 to the cell to get rid of the tiny white space between red and blue borders.

* {  box-sizing: border-box;}body,html {  width: 100%;  height: 100%;  padding: 0px;  margin: 0px;}
.full {  width: 100%;  height: 100%;  border: 10px solid red;}
#content {  width: 100%;  height: 100%;}
#content>table {  width: 100%;  height: 100%;}
#content>table>tbody>tr>td {  border: 10px solid blue;  padding: 0;}
#container {  width: 100%;  height: 100%;  border

<div id="content">  <table>    <tr>      <td style="height: 100%">        <div id="container">          <div class="full">            foo          </div>        </div>      </td>  </table></div>

How to set 100% height of div inside table cell

Demo - codepen

Here's another relevant SO answer

It appears you need to add a height to the <table> tag.

<table style="border-collapse: collapse; height:100%">

How to make div fill td height

If you give your TD a height of 1px, then the child div would have a heighted parent to calculate it's % from. Because your contents would be larger then 1px, the td would automatically grow, as would the div. Kinda a garbage hack, but I bet it would work.

Full height div inside td

With a colon? Also, to get your spacing:

<td style="position:relative;">
    <div style="width: 10px; position:absolute; top:10px; bottom:10px; background:grey">
    </div>
</td>

EDIT:

I don't think it's possible without specifying an explicit height. The solution in the original question that you pointed to does not actually work. position:relative does not seem to apply correctly to table cells. This could well be intentional and part of the spec.