Question

Given a block container

<div>
 this is a very long string which contains a bunch of characters that I want to break at container edges.
</div>

are there any css properties I can set to force it to break when it reaches the container width, regardless of the contents of the string, for example a break like:

this is a ve
ry long stri
ng which ...

is pretty much what I want. Right now, it seems to always prefer to break at whitespace characters or other special characters (such as /).

Answer 1

There’s a CSS3 property called word-break that may be of some use to you in future.

More information is available here: http://www.css3.com/css-word-break/

The break-all value looks to do the thing you’re asking for:

Useful where content contains a majority of Asian character set content, to which this value behaves like ‘normal’. Non-Asian character set content may be arbitrarily broken across lines.

As for more supported versions of CSS, I don’t believe there’s a way you can do this.