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.

Answer 1

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 &#8203; (or &shy; but you mentioned you don't want the dash).

Answer 2

You can use CSS3 property called word-wrap

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

Hope it helps!

Answer 3

use <wbr>.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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/