I am reading a string my user is inputting via PHP and I need to spit it back out in a div tag. This div tag has a width of 500px. If the user enters a word that is too long, the word will overflow the container. If the user enters two words that are almost two long, it will split into two lines.
My question is how do I determine if a word is too long or not? I have tried setting a character count, which is not an accurate representation of length as certain characters (ie W and I) have different widths. Is there a solution?
My current algorithm is to break the user input into chunks, each of 40 characters, and output it.
If you want to still implement your character count mechanism you can; you just need to make sure your text is mono-spaced (same width). To do this you can just add <pre></pre>
around your text block; this can also be accomplished with <code></code>
and <tt></tt>
but if you want a simple CSS solution you could use.
<style>
.myclass { word-wrap:break-word; }
</style>
<p class="myclass">some text</p>
Usually you shouldn't use PHP for things like that. Try CSS instead:
.break { word-wrap: break-word; }
will do the trick
you can simply break-up words that are larger than, say, 20 characters - into chunks, using the <wbr> tag. Here's some more info: http://motyar.blogspot.co.il/2011/07/tell-browser-they-may-break-your.html