Question

I use TRichEdit to edit text. I have WordWrap turned on which automatically wraps text at the edge of control so that there are no scroll-bars. RichEdit width is set to fit 80 columns.

WordWrap simulates this behaviour nicely as long as you have occasional space between words. But if you have a very loooooooooooooooooong word RichEdit wrap will break it automatically and WordWrap won’t!

If I want now to access these wrapped lines I can get it through RichEdit.Lines.Text which will put automatically CRLF at column 80. If I use RichEdit.Text I get raw text with no CRLF suitable for WordWrap.

The task is not trivial to do in a custom function as I already tried and it was not a small function but might there be a way to use wrapping functions of TRichEdit? I have an idea to create hidden RichEdit but that kind of seems stupid for this task as I would have to calculate its width just to do wordwrapping – rather pointless I think.

The question – is there a way to force WordWrap to cut long words that cannot be wrapped otherwise? So if a word is 170 characters long, it would be wrapped into 3 lines 80 + 80 + 10 but also taking care of words before to fill previous and following lines?

Answer 1

Try this on for size:

procedure TForm1.RichEdit1KeyPress(Sender: TObject; var Key: Char);
const
   MAX_LENGTH = 80;
var
  nLineCount:   integer;
  sCurrentLine: string;
begin
  for nLineCount := 0 to RichEdit1.Lines.Count - 1 do
  begin
    // no space in this line
    if (pos(' ',RichEdit1.Lines.Strings[nLineCount]) = 0) then
    begin
      if (length(RichEdit1.Lines.Strings[nLineCount]) > MAX_LENGTH) then
      begin
        // hold the whole line
        sCurrentLine := RichEdit1.Lines.Strings[nLineCount];
        // the current line, make the max value
        RichEdit1.Lines.Strings[nLineCount] := copy(sCurrentLine,1,MAX_LENGTH);
        // build the next line
        RichEdit1.Lines.Add(
        copy(sCurrentLine,MAX_LENGTH + 1,1));
      end;
    end;
  end;
end;