HTML: Soft hyphen (­) without dash?

Benjamin Wohlwend picture Benjamin Wohlwend · Feb 18, 2011 · Viewed 7.1k times · Source

I have a little layout problem: on a clients website, we show contact information of people in a little box. The width of that box is constrained. As it happens, there are people with very long names (this is in Germany, after all...), and the email address is a concatenation of the given name and family name. The result: with certain names, the email address overflows the constraints given by the about box.

Inserting a ­ before the @results in the correct line break, but looks like this:

john.doe-
@example.com

Is it possible to suppress that dash? I don't want to use <br />, because for 90% of the names, the available width is more than enough.

Answer

user241244 picture user241244 · Feb 18, 2011

Though I'm not sure how this does cross-browser (probably pretty well), you could always use the thin space character (&thinsp;) or the zero-width space (&#8203;).++

john.doe&thinsp;@example.com

++ I would not suggest using the zero-width space, as apparently some browsers will not render it correctly (source).