How to make div not larger than its contents?

Question

I have a layout similar to:

<div>
    <table>
    </table>
</div>

I would like for the div to only expand to as wide as my table becomes.

Answer 1

This has been mentioned in comments and is hard to find in one of the answers so:

If you are using display: flex for whatever reason, you can instead use:

div {
    display: inline-flex;
}

This is also widely supported across browsers.

Answer 2

Tampering around with Firebug I found the property value -moz-fit-content which exactly does what the OP wanted and could be used as follow:

width: -moz-fit-content;

Although it only works on Firefox, I couldn't find any equivalent for other browsers such as Chrome.

Answer 3

I think using

display: inline-block;

would work, however I'm not sure about the browser compatibility.

---

Another solution would be to wrap your div in another div (if you want to maintain the block behavior):

HTML:

<div>
    <div class="yourdiv">
        content
    </div>
</div>

CSS:

.yourdiv
{
    display: inline;
}

Answer 4

display: -moz-inline-stack;
display: inline-block;
zoom: 1;
*display: inline;

Foo Hack – Cross Browser Support for inline-block Styling (2007-11-19).

Answer 5

My CSS3 flexbox solution in two flavors: The one on top behaves like a span and the one at the bottom behaves like a div, taking all the width with the help of a wrapper. Their classes are "top", "bottom" and "bottomwrapper" respectively.

body {
    font-family: sans-serif;
}
.top {
    display: -webkit-inline-flex;
    display: inline-flex;
}
.top, .bottom {
    background-color: #3F3;
    border: 2px solid #FA6;
}
/* bottomwrapper will take the rest of the width */
.bottomwrapper {
    display: -webkit-flex;
    display: flex;
}
table {
    border-collapse: collapse;
}
table, th, td {
    width: 280px;
    border: 1px solid #666;
}
th {
    background-color: #282;
    color: #FFF;
}
td {
    color: #444;
}
th, td {
    padding: 0 4px 0 4px;
}

Is this
<div class="top">
	<table>
        <tr>
            <th>OS</th>
            <th>Version</th> 
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>OpenBSD</td>
            <td>5.7</td> 
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Windows</td>
            <td>Please upgrade to 10!</td> 
        </tr>
    </table>
</div>
what you are looking for?
<br>
Or may be...
<div class="bottomwrapper">
    <div class="bottom">
    	<table>
            <tr>
                <th>OS</th>
                <th>Version</th> 
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>OpenBSD</td>
                <td>5.7</td> 
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>Windows</td>
                <td>Please upgrade to 10!</td> 
            </tr>
        </table>
    </div>
</div>
this is what you are looking for.

Answer 6

An working demo is here-

.floating-box {
    display:-moz-inline-stack;
    display: inline-block;

    width: fit-content; 
    height: fit-content;

    width: 150px;
    height: 75px;
    margin: 10px;
    border: 3px solid #73AD21;  
}

<h2>The Way is using inline-block</h2>

Supporting elements are also added in CSS.

<div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
   <div class="floating-box">Floating box</div>
</div>