Soft hyphen in HTML (<wbr> vs. &shy;)

Question

How do you solve the problem with soft hyphens on your web pages? In a text there can be long words which you might want to line break with a hyphen. But you do not want the hyphen to show if the whole word is on the same line.

According to comments on this page <wbr> is a non standard "tag soup invented by Netscape". It seems like ­ has its problems with standard compliance as well. There seems to be no way to get a working solution for all browsers.

Which is your way for handling soft hyphens and why did you choose it? Is there i preferred solution or best practice?

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See related SO Discussion here.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, &shy's support is so inconsistent between browsers that it can't really be used.

QuirksMode is right -- there's no good way to use soft hyphens in HTML right now. See what you can do to go without them.

Answer 2

More information on this issue is Here

Answer 3

This is a crossbrowser solution that I was looking at a little while ago that runs on the client and using jQuery:

(function($) { 
  $.fn.breakWords = function() { 
    this.each(function() { 
      if(this.nodeType !== 1) { return; } 

      if(this.currentStyle && typeof this.currentStyle.wordBreak === 'string') { 
        //Lazy Function Definition Pattern, Peter's Blog 
        //From http://peter.michaux.ca/article/3556 
        this.runtimeStyle.wordBreak = 'break-all'; 
      } 
      else if(document.createTreeWalker) { 

        //Faster Trim in Javascript, Flagrant Badassery 
        //http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/faster-trim-javascript 

        var trim = function(str) { 
          str = str.replace(/^\s\s*/, ''); 
          var ws = /\s/, 
          i = str.length; 
          while (ws.test(str.charAt(--i))); 
          return str.slice(0, i + 1); 
        }; 

        //Lazy Function Definition Pattern, Peter's Blog 
        //From http://peter.michaux.ca/article/3556 

        //For Opera, Safari, and Firefox 
        var dWalker = document.createTreeWalker(this, NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT, null, false); 
        var node,s,c = String.fromCharCode('8203'); 
        while (dWalker.nextNode()) { 
          node = dWalker.currentNode; 
          //we need to trim String otherwise Firefox will display 
          //incorect text-indent with space characters 
          s = trim( node.nodeValue ).split('').join(c); 
          node.nodeValue = s; 
        } 
      } 
    }); 

    return this; 
  }; 
})(jQuery);