Question

I have a table with various rows that display data,
in each row I have a column with a cell for the label and a column a cell for the data.
Sometimes there may be several columns on the same row, however when I try to get a row underneath a row with 3 or more columns to only have 2 columns and for the second (data) column to span the remaining columns, colspan doesn’t seem to work.

It does work with the first column of the row but not subsequent columns.

I have tried to create a table inside the first column which works but then my label column is all out of alignment and I do not wish to manually adjust the size of the cell to try and make it align as this seems messy and will need constant attention should the label cells in the rows above or below change width… if you get what I mean.

I am not sure if this is even possible or if there is some sort of magic trick you need to do to get it to work.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated and below is a sample of what I am trying to do.

       <table cellpadding="0px" cellspacing="0px">
           <tr>
               <td>
                   My first label column
               </td>
               <td>
                   My first column data
               </td>
               <td>
                   My second label column
               </td>
               <td>
                   My second column data
               </td>
           </tr>
           <tr>
               <td>
                   My second row first column label
               </td>
               <td colspan="3">
                   My second row second column long data................................
               </td>
           </tr>
       </table>

Answer 1

No magic is needed. The code in your example works as intended. You need to post examples of situations where you think the idea does not work (and describe how it seems to fail). They may have some markup errors or other issues. In particular, each table row should have the same number of cells, when a cell with colspan=”n” is counted as n cells.

As an aside, technically, “0px” is not allowed as cellspacing or cellpadding value; use plain “0” instead. But browsers actually interpret “0px” as “0”, so this does not cause problems in practice.