How to prevent line break at hyphens in all browsers

Question

You can use ‑ which is a Unicode NON-BREAKING HYPHEN (U+2011).

HTML: ‑ or ‑

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#In_computing

One solution could be to use an extra span tag and the white-space CSS property. Just define a class like this:

.nowrap {
    white-space: nowrap;
}

And then add a span with that class around your hyphenated text.

<p>This is the <span class="nowrap">anti-inflammable</span> model</p>

This approach should work just fine in all browsers - the buggy implementations listed here are for other values of the white-space property: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/white-space#compatibilitysection

I’m afraid there’s no simpler way to do it reliably than splitting the text to “words” (sequences of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace) and wrapping each “word” that contains a hyphen inside nobr markup. So input data like bla bla foo-bar bla bla would be turned to bla bla <nobr>foo-bar</nobr> bla bla.

You might even consider inserting nobr markup whenever the “word” contains anything but letters and digits. The reason is that some browsers may even break strings like “2/3” or “f(0)” (see my page on oddities of line breaking in browsers).

Use the word joiner character (⁠) around the hyphen. It works in Internet Explorer as well.

Fix specific hyphens...

function fixicecream(text) {
    return text.replace(/ice-cream/g, 'ice⁠-⁠cream'));
}

Or everything...

function fixhyphens(text) {
    return text.replace(/(\S+)-(\S+)/g, '$1⁠-⁠$2'));
}

You are unable to do it without editing every HTML instance. Consequently, I wrote some JavaScript code to replace them:

jQuery:

// Replace hyphens with non-breaking ones
$txt = $("#block-views-video-block h2");
$txt.text( $txt.text().replace(/-/g, '‑') );

Vanilla JavaScript:

function nonBrHypens(id) {
    var str = document.getElementById(id).innerHTML;
    var txt = str.replace(/-/g, '‑');
    document.getElementById(id).innerHTML = txt;
}