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Most elegant way to force a TEXTAREA element to line-wrap, *regardless* of whitespace

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By User


Html Textarea elements only wrap when they reach a space or tab character. This is fine, until the user types a looooooooooooooooooooooong enough word. I'm looking for a way to strictly enforce line breaks (eg.: even if it results in "loooooooooooo \n ooooooooooong").



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The best I've found is to add a zero-width unicode space after every letter, but this breaks copy and paste operations. Anyone know of a better way?



Note: I'm referring to the "textarea" element here (i.e.: the one that behaves similarly to a text input) - not just a plain old block of text.


Source: Tips4all, CCNA FINAL EXAM
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Comments

  1. UserMay 10, 2012 at 3:13 AM

    The CSS settings word-wrap:break-word and text-wrap:unrestricted appear to be CSS 3 features. Good luck finding a way to do this on current implementations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UserMay 10, 2012 at 3:13 AM

    quirksmode.org has an overview of various methods.
    There's a related SO question: "In HTML, how to word-break on a dash?"
    In browsers that support it, word-wrap: break-word might give the desired effect as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UserMay 10, 2012 at 3:14 AM

    There's the non-standard element wbr that is supported by at least

    Firefox, http://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Element

    Internet Explorer, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535917(VS.85).aspx

    and Opera.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UserMay 10, 2012 at 3:14 AM

    I tested the <wbr>, &#8203; and &shy; techniques. All three worked well in IE 7, Firefox 3 and Chrome.

    The only one that did not break the copy/paste was the <wbr> tag.

    ReplyDelete
  5. UserMay 10, 2012 at 3:14 AM

    According to my tests, only Firefox has the described behavior among current browsers. So I guess your best bet is to wait for the imminent release of Firefox 3.1 to solve your problem :)

    ReplyDelete

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