How to use wordwrap or otherwise to break text to fit a fluid-width div

Question

I have a div which has a fluid width, thus I cannot predict its size in PHP. If someone enters a long string which isn\'t delimited by spaces anywhere, the browser will stretch

Answer 1

There is a CSS property of:

word-wrap: break-word;

Otherwise if you want to keep this PHP, Idealy you only want to apply a break on words with character counts greater than X, This will split the string on the space and apply a check to each word. You may run into problems with links, but you could easily check for starting url characters or apply a regex.

$text = 'this text is fine but waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay long stuff gets broken waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay  up into bits';

if($array = explode(' ',$text) and is_array($array))
{
  foreach($array as $key => $value)
  {
    if(strlen($value) > 10)
      $array[$key] =  wordwrap($value, 10, "­", true);
  }
  $text = implode(' ',$array);
}

echo $text;

In this example words with a length greater than 10 are then word wrapped with the ­ character, which is pretty useful as it produces a soft hyphen on breaks. Replace it with your breaking character if you would perfer no additional hyphens. You can also try the word wrap with a lower number than the max length before breaking, IE strlen > 20, word wrap at 10

Sample: http://i.imgur.com/fKINR.png