Most elegant way to force a TEXTAREA element to line-wrap, *regardless* of whitespace

Answer 1

There's the non-standard element wbr that is supported by at least

Firefox, http://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Element

Internet Explorer, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535917(VS.85).aspx

and Opera.

Answer 2

• quirksmode.org has an overview of various methods.
• There's a related SO question: "In HTML, how to word-break on a dash?"
• In browsers that support it, word-wrap: break-word might give the desired effect as well.

Answer 3

I tested the <wbr>, &#8203; and &shy; techniques. All three worked well in IE 7, Firefox 3 and Chrome.

The only one that did not break the copy/paste was the <wbr> tag.

Answer 4

The CSS settings word-wrap:break-word and text-wrap:unrestricted appear to be CSS 3 features. Good luck finding a way to do this on current implementations.

Answer 5

According to my tests, only Firefox has the described behavior among current browsers. So I guess your best bet is to wait for the imminent release of Firefox 3.1 to solve your problem :)