How can I force a long string without any blank to be wrapped?

Question

for block elements:

<textarea style="width:100px; word-wrap:break-word;">
  ACTGATCGAGCTGAAGCGCAGTGCGATGCTTCGATGATGCTGACGATGCTACGATGCGAGCATCTACGATCAGTC
</textarea>

for inline elements:

<span style="width:100px; word-wrap:break-word; display:inline-block;"> 
   ACTGATCGAGCTGAAGCGCAGTGCGATGCTTCGATGATGCTGACGATGCTACGATGCGAGCATCTACGATCAGTC
</span>

Place zero-width spaces at the points where you want to allow breaks. The zero-width space is ​ in HTML. For example:

ACTGATCG​AGCTGAAG​CGCAGTGC​GATGCTTC​GATGATGC

Here are some very useful answers:

How to prevent long words from breaking my div?

to save you time, this can be solved with css:

white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */
white-space: -hp-pre-wrap; /* HP printers */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */
white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3 (and 2.1 as well, actually) */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE */
word-break: break-all;

For me this works,

<td width="170px" style="word-wrap:break-word;">
  <div style="width:140px;overflow:auto">
    LONGTEXTGOESHERELONGDIVGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESLONGTEXTGOESHERELONGDIVLONGTEXTLONGTEXT
  </div>
</td>

You can also use a div inside another div instead of td. I used overflow:auto, as it shows all the text both in my Opera and IE browsers.

I don't think you can do this with CSS. Instead, at regular 'word lengths' along the string, insert an HTML soft-hyphen:

ACTGATCG­AGCTGAAG­CGCAGTGC­GATGCTTC­GATGATGC­TGACGATG

This will display a hyphen at the end of the line, where it wraps, which may or may not be what you want.

Note Safari seems to wrap the long string in a <textarea> anyway, unlike Firefox.

Use a CSS method to force wrap a string that has no white-spaces. Three methods:

1) Use the CSS white-space property. To cover browser inconsistencies, you have to declare it several ways. So just put your looooong string into some block level element (e.g., div, pre, p) and give that element the following css:

some_block_level_tag {
    white-space: pre;           /* CSS 2.0 */
    white-space: pre-wrap;      /* CSS 2.1 */
    white-space: pre-line;      /* CSS 3.0 */
    white-space: -pre-wrap;     /* Opera 4-6 */
    white-space: -o-pre-wrap;   /* Opera 7 */
    white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */
    white-space: -hp-pre-wrap;  /* HP Printers */
    word-wrap: break-word;      /* IE 5+ */
}

2) use the force-wrap mixin from Compass.

3) I was just looking into this as well and I think might also work (but I need to test browser support more completely):

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

Reference: wrapping content