How to limit a table cell to one line of text using CSS?

Question

Hi,

I have a table of users where each row contains their names, e-mail address, and such. For some users this row is one text line high, for some others two, etc. But I would like that each row of the table be one text line high, truncating the rest.

I saw these two questions:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2779779/a-column-of-a-table-needs-to-stay-in-one-line-html-css-javascript
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1318108/css-limit-element-to-1-line

In fact my question is exactly similar to the first one, but since the link is dead I can't study it. Both answers say to use white-space: nowrap. However this doesn't work, maybe I'm missing something.

Since I can't show you the code, I reproduced the problem:

<style type="text/css">
td {
    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow: hidden;
    width: 125px;
    height: 25px;
}
</style>

<div style="width:500px">
<table>
    <tr>
        <td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
        <td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
        <td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
        <td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
    </tr>
</table>
</div>

Without white-space the table is 500px wide, and the text takes more than one line.

But white-space: nowrap makes the browser simply ignore the width directive and increase the width of the table until all data fits in one line.

What am I doing wrong ? Thanks

Answer 1

overflow will only work if it knows where to start considering it overflown. You need to set the width and height attribute of the <td>

TAKE 2

Try adding table-layout: fixed; width:500px; to the table's style.

UPDATE 3

confirmed this worked: http://jsfiddle.net/e3Eqn/

Answer 2

Add the following to your stylesheet:

table{ width: 500px; table-layout:fixed; }

You need to add the table width to ensure that the next property will fit the elements to the specified size. The table-layout property here forces the browser to use a fixed layout within the 500 pixels it's given.