CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcssline-breaks
Jitendra Vyas
Jitendra Vyas

Reputation: 152875

How to line-break from css, without using <br />?

How to achieve same output without <br>?

<p>hello <br> How are you </p>

output:

hello
How are you

Upvotes: 554

Views: 1586785

Answers (29)

user22666461
user22666461

Reputation:

Simple easy solution. Name th external paragraph class as 'parent' and internal paragraph as 'child'.

Set css property

parent: margin-bottom: 0;

child: margin-top: 0;

You are good to go. 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
  <title>Solve</title>
  <style>
    .parent {
      margin-bottom: 0;
    }
    
    .child {
      margin-top: 0;
    }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
  <p class="parent"> hello
    <p class="child">How are you</p>
  </p>
</body>

</html>

Upvotes: 0

Simon_Weaver
Simon_Weaver

Reputation: 146208

Use <br/> as normal, but hide it with display: none

I would expect most people finding this question are looking to use responsive design to decide whether or not a line-break appears in a specific place.

While not immediately obvious, you can apply display:none to a <br/> in order to hide it.

br { display: none; }

This means you can use media queries just as you would for any other css.

<div>
  The quick brown fox<br />
  jumps over the lazy dog
</div>

@media screen and (min-width: 20em) {
  br {
    /* hide the BR tag for wider screens (i.e. no line break) */
    display: none; 
  }
}

This can be useful if you need to force a line break in a different place based on the screen width. And of course you can also use &nbsp; if you want to always prevent a line break from happening in a specific place.

jsfiddle example

Upvotes: 162

Joey Adams
Joey Adams

Reputation: 43410

You can use white-space: pre; to make elements act like <pre>, which preserves newlines. Example:

p {
  white-space: pre;
}
<p>hello 
How are you</p>

Upvotes: 530

Nicol&#242; Cavalli
Nicol&#242; Cavalli

Reputation: 181

A modern and simple solution could be setting the width like that:

width: min-content;

This CSS rule is mostly useful for text content, but not only: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/min-content

p {
  margin: 20px;
  color: #222;
  font-family:'Century Gothic', sans-serif;
  border: 2px dotted grey;
  padding: 3px;
}

.max {
  width: max-content;
}

.min {
  width: min-content;
}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head />
  <body>
    <p class="max"> Max width available </p>
    <p class="min"> Min width available </p>
  </body>
</html>

Upvotes: 2

petermeissner
petermeissner

Reputation: 12900

There are several options for defining the handling of white spaces and line breaks. If one can put the content in e.g. a <p> tag it is pretty easy to get whatever one wants.

For preserving line breaks but not white spaces use pre-line (not pre) like in:

<style>
 p {
     white-space: pre-line; /* collapse WS, preserve LB */
   }
</style>

<p>hello
How are you</p>

If another behavior is wanted choose among one of these (WS=WhiteSpace, LB=LineBreak):

white-space: normal;   /* collapse WS, wrap as necessary, collapse LB */
white-space: nowrap;   /* collapse WS, no wrapping,       collapse LB */
white-space: pre;      /* preserve WS, no wrapping,       preserve LB */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* preserve WS, wrap as necessary, preserve LB */
white-space: inherit;  /* all as parent element */

SOURCE: W3 Schools

Upvotes: 150

SeyyedKhandon
SeyyedKhandon

Reputation: 6131

On CSS-tricks, Chris Coyier have tested lots of options and the final and pretty neat one was using display:table, Each one have their own problems which you will find out when you use background-color on the span!

body {
  padding: 20px;
  font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
}

h1 {
  font-weight: 300;
  font-size: 24px;
  line-height: 1.6;
  background: #eee;
  padding: 20px;
  margin: 5px 0 25px 0;
  text-align:center;
}
h1 span {
  color: white;
  font-weight: 900;
}

h1 span {
    background: black;
    padding: 1px 8px;
    display: table;
    margin:auto;
}
<h1 class="one">

  Break right after this
  <span>
    and before this
  </span>

</h1>

Here You can see all other options on codepen:

Injecting a Line Break

Upvotes: 1

Liam
Liam

Reputation: 6743

Using white-space will not work for long sentences without spaces like HiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGood...etc to fix this consider using word-wrap: break-word; instead

it's made to allow long words to be able to break and wrap onto the next line., its used by Facebook, Instagram and me 😆

Example

#container {
    width: 40%;
    background-color: grey;
    overflow:hidden;
    margin:10px;
}
#container p{
   white-space: pre-line;
    background-color: green;
}
.flex{
    display: flex;
}

#wrap {
    width: 30%;
    background-color: grey;
    overflow:hidden;
    margin:10px;
}
#wrap p{
   word-wrap: break-word;
    background-color: green;
}
<h1> white-space: pre-line;</h1>
<div class='flex'>

<div id="container">
<h5>With spaces </h5>
    <p>Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1</p>
</div>

<div id="container">
  <h5>No specaes (not working )</h5>  <p>HiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGoodHiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGoodHiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGood</p>
</div>
</div>




<h1>  word-wrap: break-word;</h1>
<div class='flex'>

<div id="wrap">
<h5>With spaces </h5>
    <p>Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1 Sample Text 1</p>
</div>

<div id="wrap">
  <h5>No specaes (working )</h5>  <p>HiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGoodHiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGoodHiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGoodHiHowAreYouHopeYouAreDoingGood</p>
</div>
</div>

Upvotes: 1

mad Man
mad Man

Reputation: 386

The code can be:

<div class="text-class"><span>hello</span><span>How are you</span></div>

CSS would be:

.text-class {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: flex-start;
  flex-direction: column;
  align-items: center;
}

Upvotes: 3

Andi Giga
Andi Giga

Reputation: 4192

This works in Chrome:

p::after {
  content: "-";
  color: transparent;
  display: block;
}

Upvotes: 0

Alexxandar
Alexxandar

Reputation: 994

You can add a lot of padding and force text to be split to new line, for example

p {
  padding-right: 50%;
}

Worked fine for me in a situation with responsive design, where only within a certain width range it was needed for text to be split.

Upvotes: 2

Jarek
Jarek

Reputation: 79

I like very simple solutions, here is one more:

<p>hello <span>How are you</span></p>

and CSS:

p {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
}

Upvotes: 5

Den Pat
Den Pat

Reputation: 1284

Use overflow-wrap: break-word; like:

.yourelement{
  overflow-wrap: break-word;
}

Upvotes: 8

burunoh
burunoh

Reputation: 774

In the CSS use the code

p {
  white-space: pre-line;
}

With this CSS every enter inside the P tag will be a break-line at the HTML.

Upvotes: 44

David Latapie
David Latapie

Reputation: 721

The "\a" command in CSS generates a carriage return. This is CSS, not HTML, so it shall be closer to what you want: no extra markup.

In a blockquote, the example below displays both the title and the source link and separate the two with a carriage return ("\a"):

blockquote[title][cite]:after {
  content:attr(title)"\a"attr(cite)
}

Upvotes: 72

Vincent Robert
Vincent Robert

Reputation: 36150

Impossible with the same HTML structure, you must have something to distinguish between Hello and How are you.

I suggest using spans that you will then display as blocks (just like a <div> actually).

p span {
  display: block;
}
<p><span>hello</span><span>How are you</span></p>

Upvotes: 474

Jacek Krawczyk
Jacek Krawczyk

Reputation: 2194

You need to declare the content within <span class="class_name"></span>. After it the line will be break.

\A means line feed character.

.class_name::after {
  content: "\A";
  white-space: pre;
}

Upvotes: 2

Krankit
Krankit

Reputation: 71

I'm guessing you did not want to use a breakpoint because it will always break the line. Is that correct? If so how about adding a breakpoint <br /> in your text, then giving it a class like <br class="hidebreak"/> then using media query right above the size you want it to break to hide the <br /> so it breaks at a specific width but stays inline above that width.

HTML:

<p>
The below line breaks at 766px.
</p>

<p>
 This is the line of text<br class="hidebreak"> I want to break.
</p>

CSS:

@media (min-width: 767px) {
  br.hidebreak {display:none;}
}

https://jsfiddle.net/517Design/o71yw5vd/

Upvotes: 0

T.Todua
T.Todua

Reputation: 56557

<pre> <---------------------------------------
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
</pre> <--------------------------------------

OR

<div style="white-space:pre">  <-----------------------------------
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
lorem ipsum
</div>                         <-----------------------------------

source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36191199/2377343

Upvotes: 11

Beejor
Beejor

Reputation: 9408

For a List of Links

The other answers provide some good ways of adding line breaks, depending on the situation. But it should be noted that the :after selector is one of the better ways to do this for CSS control over lists of links (and similar things), for reasons noted below.

Here's an example, assuming a table of contents:

<style type="text/css">
    .toc a:after{ content: "\a"; white-space: pre; }
</style>

<span class="toc">
    <a href="#a1">Item A1</a> <a href="#a2">Item A2</a>
    <a href="#b1">Item B1</a> <a href="#b2">Item B2</a>
</span>

And here's Simon_Weaver's technique, which is simpler and more compatible. It doesn't separate style and content as much, requires more code, and there may be cases where you want to add breaks after the fact. Still a great solution though, especially for older IE.

<style type="text/css">
    .toc br{ display: none; } /* comment out for horizontal links */
</style>

<span class="toc">
    <a href="#a1">Item A1</a><br/> <a href="#a2">Item A2</a><br/>
    <a href="#b1">Item B1</a><br/> <a href="#b2">Item B2</a><br/>
</span>

Note the advantages of the above solutions:

  • No matter the whitespace in the HTML, the output is the same (vs. pre)
  • No extra padding is added to the elements (see NickG's display:block comments)
  • You can easily switch between horizontal and vertical lists of links with some shared CSS without going into every HTML file for a style change
  • No float or clear styles affecting surrounding content
  • The style is separate from the content (vs. <br/>, or pre with hard-coded breaks)
  • This can also work for loose links using a.toc:after and <a class="toc">
  • You can add multiple breaks and even prefix/suffix text

Upvotes: 5

JPB
JPB

Reputation: 600

Using &nbsp; instead of spaces will prevent a break.

<span>I&nbsp;DONT&nbsp;WANT&nbsp;TO&nbsp;BREAK&nbsp;THIS&nbsp;LINE&nbsp;UP, but this text can be on any line.</span>

Upvotes: -1

Bryan
Bryan

Reputation: 78

Setting a br tag to display: none is helpful, but then you can end up with WordsRunTogether. I've found it more helpful to instead replace it with a space character, like so:

HTML:

<h1>
    Breaking<br />News:<br />BR<br />Considered<br />Harmful!
</h1>

CSS:

@media (min-device-width: 1281px){
    h1 br {content: ' ';}
    h1 br:after {content: ' ';}
}

Upvotes: 4

cruzanmo
cruzanmo

Reputation: 777

Building on what has been said before, this is a pure CSS solution that works.

<style>
  span {
    display: inline;
  }
  span:before {
    content: "\a ";
    white-space: pre;
  }
</style>
<p>
  First line of text. <span>Next line.</span>
</p>

Upvotes: 32

Jay
Jay

Reputation: 1157

In case this helps someone...

You could do this:

<p>This is an <a class="on-new-line">inline link</a>?</p>

With this css:

a.on-new-line:before { 
  content: '&nbsp;'; 
  font-size:0; 
  display:block;
  line-height:0;
}

Upvotes: 0

Alohci
Alohci

Reputation: 83125

Here's a bad solution to a bad question, but one that literally meets the brief:

p {
    width : 12ex;
}

p:before {
    content: ".";
    float: right;
    padding-left: 6ex;
    visibility: hidden;
}

Upvotes: 8

Dorian
Dorian

Reputation: 24009

Maybe someone will have the same issue as me:

I was in a element with display: flex so I had to use flex-direction: column.

Upvotes: 5

Gene Bo
Gene Bo

Reputation: 12103

In my case, I needed an input button to have a line break before it.
I applied the following style to the button and it worked:

clear:both;

Upvotes: 0

stephan
stephan

Reputation: 31

How about<pre> tag?

source: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_pre.asp

Upvotes: 3

Bite code
Bite code

Reputation: 597401

Both Vincent Robert and Joey Adams answers are valid. If you don't want, however, change the markup, you can just insert a <br /> using javascript.

There is no way to do it in CSS without changing the markup.

Upvotes: 0

Syntax Error
Syntax Error

Reputation: 4527

To make an element have a line break afterwards, assign it:

display:block;

Non-floated elements after a block level element will appear on the next line. Many elements, such as <p> and <div> are already block level elements so you can just use those.

But while this is good to know, this really depends more on the context of your content. In your example, you would not want to use CSS to force a line break. The <br /> is appropriate because semantically the p tag is the the most appropriate for the text you are displaying. More markup just to hang CSS off it is unnecessary. Technically it's not exactly a paragraph, but there is no <greeting> tag, so use what you have. Describing your content well with HTMl is way more important - after you have that then figure out how to make it look pretty.

Upvotes: 11

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