[Resolved] Word wrapping in css

[piersk]

Is this possible? It seems there is an IE only option, but not a cross-browser one.

[dalecosp]

Whaddya mean exactly? You can do a bit with "float" and "clear" ....

[piersk]

Well, at the moment, the text is doing this (http://piersonthe.net). And it shouldn't be

[goldbug]

Well, when are you really going to use a string that long with no breaks? (A space or two will cause a wrap)

If you feel like forcing a wrap, consider the <wbr /> tag.

[dalecosp]

I assume he's talking about ensuring that some [not-so]-friendly blog respondent enters some gobbledygook string that will ruin his site's appearance.

I'm just now looking for something on the <wbr /> tag (thanks, gb!) However, there are a number of PHP possibilities in the manual's user notes on strlen and maybe some other similar functions: // courtesy of 'php a+ capcarerre d.t 0rg'

function nicetrim ($s) {
// limit the length of the given string to $MAX_LENGTH char
// If it is more, it keeps the first $MAX_LENGTH-3 characters
// and adds "..."
// It counts HTML char such as &aacute; as 1 char.
//

$MAX_LENGTH = 22;
$str_to_count = html_entity_decode($s);
if (strlen($str_to_count) <= $MAX_LENGTH) {
return $s;
}

$s2 = substr($str_to_count, 0, $MAX_LENGTH - 3);
$s2 .= "...";
return htmlentities($s2);
}
I see no reason why you couldn't even insert the ellipsis (or probably a hyphen would be preferred) and a space and return the entire string...

Of course, I could be missing Piers' point entirely.

HTH,

[goldbug]

Originally posted by dalecosp
I'm just now looking for something on the <wbr /> tag (thanks, gb!)

I should probably add it's not mentioned in any W3C XHTML DTD :( (However, there's no reason it can't exist in your own DTD. IE & Gecko should have no problem with <wbr>)

[Merve]

I guess <wbr /> hasn't been implemented in XHTML because word-wrap was supposed to be implemented in CSS, but it isn't yet, so I guess for now all you can do is break up long words with hyphens using PHP, as was previously suggested.

[Elizabeth]

Not sure what it's supposed to look like, but it's wrapping fine for me. :confused:

[Weedpacket]

Originally posted by Merve
word-wrap was supposed to be implemented in CSS, but it isn't yet Well, it is (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#white-space-prop), but only with regard to whitespace; discretionary word breaks aren't covered yet (http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-text-20030514/#line-breaking).

[vaaaska]

Looks fine to me...on Safari 1.2.4...

But your spaces need room to breathe...it's really rough on the eyes...

[Weedpacket]

Concurrence with the rest of the crew. Can I ***** about the poor description of the problem? :evilgrin:

[piersk]

Sorry, I made a little boo boo. Of course (as gb pointed out) there would never be a word that long, so tis unnecessary to have any wrapping