You can try to specify specific table cell widths in HTML, but there's no guarantee that the browser will respect it. Sometimes some browsers just don't handle it well.

A hack is to use Text::Wrap and convert newlines to "br" tags. It's not elegant, but it's the only way to ensure the text is shown as you want it (99% of the time, anyway).

<td width="25%">big long sentance . . .</td>
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use constant POS => 10;

my $str = 'big old long sentance blah blah blah';
my $len;
foreach (split(/\s/,$str)) {
    $len += length;
    print;
    ($len % POS) ? print ' ' : print '<br>';
}
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#inside foreach
    $len += length;
    print;
    if ($len > POS) {        # thanks nlafferty
         print '<br>';
         $len = 0;
    }
    else {
        print ' ';
    }
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Jeff

R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--
L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--

That only wraps a line if it ends at a multiple of the boundary, it doesn't prevent a word from going past it (you need to check if the current word is going to go past the boundary before printing it). On a $str of 'George Washington was the first president of these United States' it won't insert a <br> despite there being significantly more than 10 chars in it. This loop should do it:


foreach (split(/\s/, $str))
 {
   if($len + 1 + length > POS && $len)
    {
      $len = 0;
      print "\n";
    }
   elsif($len)
    {
      print ' ';
      $len++;
    }
   print;
   $len += length;
 }
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This should also work:

#example 1
$content =~ s/(.{1,$width}) /$1<BR>/g;
print $content;
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or

#example 2
$content =~ s/(.{1,$width}) |([^ ]{$width})/$1$2<BR>/g;
print $content;
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The $width represents the largest number of characters each line should have.
The first example does not break single words longer than the variable $width specifies. The second will.

So i want

use constant POS => 10;

my $str = '$comment';
my $len;
foreach (split(/\s/,$str)) {
    $len += length;
    print;
    if ($len > 10) {
         print '<br>';
         $len = 0;
    }
    else {
        print ' ';
    }
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? Where does the POS come in?

This works only for text that contains certain characters. (Whitespace, -, and probably a few others) I'll call these breakable characters. (certain browsers may break without these characters anyway, but i've seen many that don't).

The Chatterbox to the right uses the approach of forcing a space every x characters, probably every x characters after the last breakable character. This will then let the previously mentioned specification of table widths work.

Or, just read the neat, handy-dandy-doody documentation that comes with CGI, as it explains how to do that.