What's the opposite of a nbsp?

Question

A   character is a space which doesn't allow for line breaking.

<p>lorem ipsum here&nbsp;are&nbsp;some&nbsp;words and so on</p>

| lorem ipsum                |
| here are some words and so |
| on                         |

What's the opposite of that? That is, a character which is NOT rendered as a space, but CAN be used for line breaking.

<p>foo supercalifragilisticexpialidocious bar</p>
<!--   put char here ^   and here ^ -->

|foo supercalifragi |
|listicexpiali      |
|docious bar        |

or with wider size:

|foo supercalifragilisticexpiali   |
|docious bar                       |

I'm aware of the soft-hyphen character, but for my purposes, I specifically do not want a hyphen added at the break.

score 96 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

96

You want the unicode character ZERO-WIDTH SPACE (\u200B).

You can get it in HTML with  or .

Explicit breaks and non-breaks:

LB7 : Do not break before spaces or zero width space.
LB8 : Break before any character following a zero-width space, even if one or more spaces intervene.
http://unicode.org/reports/tr14/

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Jan 12 '10 at 03:32

Anon.

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I tested this, it does not produce a line break in Firefox 3.5.7. – Noon Silk Jan 12 '10 at 03:35
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It's not meant to produce an explicit linebreak. It's meant to indicate a point where the line *can* be wrapped if it's too long to fit in wherever it's supposed to go. – Anon. Jan 12 '10 at 03:37
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So.... this character can be evil because if you copy content around that contains it (in unicode-aware editors that will happily play along) you will be unaware of its presence, and it will cause e.g. compilers to choke on it. hard. For example Chrome will tell you "ILLEGAL CHARACTER" but not point out to you where it is. I'd use this admittedly neat trick as a very last resort – Steven Lu Aug 21 '13 at 17:04
It should be called a "Non Space Break" – jackreichert Aug 05 '14 at 13:04
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It's visible alternative is a Hyphen. – davidcondrey Mar 10 '15 at 08:27

score 38 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 16 '14 at 09:51

38

There also is the little-known wbr tag, which lets the browser to decide whether to break the line or not.

edited Jun 16 '14 at 09:51

Paul D. Waite

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answered Jan 12 '10 at 03:42

Matt Hampel

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It should be noted that this is non-standard, and not supported in all browsers. – Brian Campbell Jan 12 '10 at 03:44
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@Brian, check the quirksmode link fredden posted. – nickf Jan 12 '10 at 05:03
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If it's good enough for Facebook, it's good enough for every one ;-) – Martin Bean Feb 05 '10 at 13:32
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WBR works in Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m, Firefox 29.0.1, and Opera Chromium 12.17. It does not work in IE 11.0.9600.17105. – Dave Burton May 14 '14 at 19:17
does add an `-` ? – beppe9000 Jan 11 '20 at 17:55
@beppe9000 You may want to have a look at [``](https://stackoverflow.com/q/226464/7669319) – Felix Jassler Sep 28 '21 at 23:20

score 17 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 12 '10 at 04:15

17

There's a nice page over at quirksmode.org that answers this question quite nicely IMHO. http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html

In short: use <wbr /> or  (or  but you mentioned you don't want the dash).

answered Jan 12 '10 at 04:15

fredden

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Not all of these possibilities are supported by all browsers. I guess is the best solution as most browsers should be able to recognize Unicode. – AndiDog Jan 12 '10 at 09:51
and IE6 users get an ugly glyph apparently... my heart weeps. – nickf Jan 12 '10 at 11:51

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 12 '10 at 03:43

4

use <wbr>.

answered Jan 12 '10 at 03:43

jrharshath

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score 3 · Answer 5 · edited Dec 06 '18 at 10:14

3

You can use CSS3 property called word-wrap

p.test {word-wrap:break-word;}

Hope it helps!

edited Dec 06 '18 at 10:14

guettli

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answered Jun 16 '14 at 09:57

Swanidhi

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This works only if you don't care where the line break is added. – JJJ Apr 12 '15 at 17:05
The question is to set a position in a specific word where to break, not how to enable work break in general. – Frode Evensen Oct 10 '19 at 08:11

score -5 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 14 '10 at 21:38

-5

theres a lot of discussion about this but it has become more or less standard to use 

answered Sep 14 '10 at 21:38

The Surrican

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This is a soft hyphen, which the asker didn't want. – Mechanical snail Aug 01 '11 at 19:08

What's the opposite of a nbsp?

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