Word-wrap in an HTML table

html css html-table
psychotik picture psychotik · Aug 11, 2009 · Viewed 786.2k times · Source

I've been using word-wrap: break-word to wrap text in divs and spans. However, it doesn't seem to work in table cells. I have a table set to width:100%, with one row and two columns. Text in columns, although styled with the above word-wrap, doesn't wrap. It causes the text to go past the bounds of the cell. This happens on Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Here's what the source looks like:

The long word above is larger than the bounds of my page, but it doesn't break with the above HTML. I've tried the suggestions below of adding text-wrap:suppress and text-wrap:normal, but neither helped.

Answer

Marc Stober picture Marc Stober · Dec 10, 2009

The following works for me in Internet Explorer. Note the addition of the table-layout:fixed CSS attribute

td {
  border: 1px solid;
}
<table style="table-layout: fixed; width: 100%">
  <tr>
    <td style="word-wrap: break-word">
      LongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongLongWord
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Related questions

Set cellpadding and cellspacing in CSS?

In an HTML table, the cellpadding and cellspacing can be set like this: <table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1"> How can the same be accomplished using CSS?

Read More
Make a div fill the height of the remaining screen space

I am working on a web application where I want the content to fill the height of the entire screen. The page has a header, which contains a logo, and account information. This could be an arbitrary height. I want …

Read More
Table fixed header and scrollable body

I am trying to make a table with fixed header and a scrollable content using the bootstrap 3 table. Unfortunately the solutions I have found does not work with bootstrap or mess up the style. Here there is a simple bootstrap …

Read More