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What is the best way to break HTML text on slashes (/)?

I have an HTML table 360px wide, which works great. The challenge is that sometimes a url appears http://this/is/a/really-really-really-really-really/long/url in the text. This causes the table to expand horizontally and a scroll bar appears on the bottom.

I don't think overflow:hidden will work because half of the text would be hidden.

What is the best way to force breaking the line on slashes (/) and dashes (-) in CSS (hopefully)?

It should work with IE7+, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Working in Rails 3 and jQuery.

Solution

  • tl;dr; (edited Apr 2022)

    Use <wbr> word-break-opportunity element before each /. See first link in further reading below.

    Details (original from 2014)

    While the css word-wrap: break-word; does work, its implementation is different across browsers.

    If you have control of the content and want exact breakpoints, you can insert

    • a <wbr> word break (supported in all major browsers except IE8 CanIUse.com);
    • &#8203; zero-width space (U+200B) - ugly in IE<=6
    • &shy; soft hyphen - though of course this adds a hyphen when breaking which is not always what is desired.

    I have a large corporate user base who still have to use IE8, so when I hit this problem I used the C# someString.Replace("/", "/&#8203;") in the server-side code.

    Gotcha: If you insert a zero-width space in an email address, when a user copies and pastes into their email client, the space gets copied too and the email will fail with no way for a user to see why (the space is zero width ...)

    References

    Further Reading