'What is the best way to break HTML text on slashes (/)?

I have an HTML table 360px wide, which works great. The challenge is that sometimes a url appears http://this/is/a/really-really-really-really-really/long/url in the text. This causes the table to expand horizontally and a scroll bar appears on the bottom.

I don't think overflow:hidden will work because half of the text would be hidden.

What is the best way to force breaking the line on slashes (/) and dashes (-) in CSS (hopefully)?

It should work with IE7+, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Working in Rails 3 and jQuery.

Solution 1:^[1]

You can use word-wrap : break-word; like so:

<div>http://www.aaa.com/bbb/ccc/ddd/eee/fff/ggg</div>

div {
    width : 50px;
    border : 1px solid #000;
    word-wrap : break-word;
}

I tested this in: I.E. 6/7/8, Firefox 7, Opera 11, Safari 5, Chrome 15

Here is a jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/p4SxG/

Solution 2:^[2]

tl;dr; (edited Apr 2022)

Use <wbr> word-break-opportunity element before each /. See first link in further reading below.

Details (original from 2014)

While the css word-wrap: break-word; does work, its implementation is different across browsers.

If you have control of the content and want exact breakpoints, you can insert

a <wbr> word break (supported in all major browsers except IE8 CanIUse.com);
 zero-width space (U+200B) - ugly in IE<=6
 soft hyphen - though of course this adds a hyphen when breaking which is not always what is desired.

I have a large corporate user base who still have to use IE8, so when I hit this problem I used the C# someString.Replace("/", "/") in the server-side code.

Gotcha: If you insert a zero-width space in an email address, when a user copies and pastes into their email client, the space gets copied too and the email will fail with no way for a user to see why (the space is zero width ...)

References

Stack Overflow
http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html - with examples

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1
Solution 2

'What is the best way to break HTML text on slashes (/)?

Solution 1:[1]

Solution 2:[2]