Most elegant way to force a TEXTAREA element to line-wrap, *regardless* of whitespace
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”).
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.
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.
- 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-wordmight give the desired effect as well.
Breaking long words at textarea width size:
1) for modern browsers:
textarea { word-break: break-all; }
2) for IE8 compatibility add:
textarea { -ms-word-break: break-all; }
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531184%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
3) add IE11 compatibility hack:
Internet Explorer 11 word wrap is not working
@media all and (-ms-high-contrast:none) {
*::-ms-backdrop, textarea { white-space: pre; }
}
This code it’s working fine on:
-IE 11, Chrome 51, Firefox 46 (Windows 7);
-IE 8, Chrome 49, Firefox 18 (Windows Xp);
-Edge 12.10240 , Opera 30 (Windows 10);
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.
I tested the <wbr>, ​ and ­ 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.
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 🙂
The most elegant way is to use wrap="soft" for wrapping entire words or wrap="hard" for wrapping by character or wrap="off" for not wrapping at all though the last one wrap="off" is often not needed as automatically the browser uses automatically as if it was wrap="off".
EXAMPLE:
<textarea name="tbox" cols="24" rows="4" wrap="soft"></textarea>
