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cssline-breaks

Can CSS force a line break after each word in an element?

I'm building a multilingual site, with the owner helping me with some translations. Some of the displayed phrases need line breaks to maintain the style of the site.

Unfortunately, the owner isn't a computer guy, so if he sees foo<br />bar there's the chance he'll modify the data somehow as he's translating.

Is there a CSS solution (besides changing the width) to apply to an element which would break after every word?

(I know I can do this in PHP, but I'm wondering if there's a nifty trick I don't know about in CSS to accomplish the same thing, perhaps in the CJK features.)

EDIT

I'll attempt to diagram what's happening:

----------------          ----------------
| Short Word   |          | Gargantuan   |
|              |          | Word         |
----------------          ----------------

The long word breaks automatically, the short word doesn't. I want it to look like this:

----------------          ----------------
| Short        |          | Gargantuan   |
| Word         |          | Word         |
----------------          ----------------
Solution

  • Use

    .one-word-per-line {
    word-spacing: <parent-width>; 
}

.your-classname{
    width: min-intrinsic;
    width: -webkit-min-content;
    width: -moz-min-content;
    width: min-content;
    display: table-caption;
    display: -ms-grid;
    -ms-grid-columns: min-content;
}

    where <parent-width> is the width of the parent element (or an arbitrary high value that doesn't fit into one line). That way you can be sure that there is even a line-break after a single letter. Works with Chrome/FF/Opera/IE7+ (and probably even IE6 since it's supporting word-spacing as well).