Can pre tags handle word wrap?

Hi rsiedl,
Have you tried setting the width and overflow
pre {width:300px; overflow:scroll;}

Otherwise you could count characters as the come from the database and find the closest space to the width you want then force a break.
Uhmm scrollbars are starting to look really good.

Hey Tony,

Thanks for the suggestion and yeah I had thought of that. Unfortunately the page needs to be printed so an overflow is not really an option.

Had also thought about creating a "Perl wrap script" but was really really hoping there would be an easier way to get around this. I should know by now that nothing is ever easy.

Cheers.

Wandering from CSS to SQL...

When you get the data from the database, could you not run a command on it to convert all \n's to <br>'s? Something like:
SELECT id, REPLACE(blurb,"\n","<br>"), ... FROM x ...
Not exactly sure how you'd represent the \n mind, I suppose just a line break in the SQL query.

Hmm, that could make my life a lot easier in one of my scripts... why did I never think of that before?

that though also did cross my mind but I ruled it out because of things like whitespaces. You would have to replace all those as well so that the user gets the same text as what they inputed. And im not sure what else pre prints that I would have to check for and replace.

In the end I have just used a perl sub to "wrap" the text.

##############################################
# Subroutine: wrapText ( line_to_wrap_at, text_to_wrap )
# Takes some text and wraps it to the number of characters specified.
# Returns the wrapped text.
##############################################
sub wrapText {
        my ($wrap,$buffer) = @_;
        my ($start, $rest, $tmp, $something);
        ### Need to isolate words longer than the wrap size ...
        $buffer =~ s/([^\s]{$wrap,})\s/\n$1\n/g;
        ### ... and then do real wrapping.
        while ($buffer =~ /([^\n]{$wrap})/) {
                $start = $`;
                $rest = $';
                $something = $1;
                $something =~ s/((.|\n)*)\s((.|\n)*)/$1\n$3/;
                $something =~ /((.|\n)*)(\n.*)/;
                $tmp .= $start . $1;
                $buffer = $3 . $rest;
        }
        $buffer = $tmp . $buffer;
        return $buffer;
}