<wbr>: The Line Break Opportunity element

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The <wbr>HTML element represents a word break opportunity—a position within text where the browser may optionally break a line, though its line-breaking rules would not otherwise create a break at that location.

Try it

<div id="example-paragraphs"> <p>Fernstraßenbauprivatfinanzierungsgesetz</p> <p>Fernstraßen<wbr />bau<wbr />privat<wbr />finanzierungs<wbr />gesetz</p> <p>Fernstraßen&shy;bau&shy;privat&shy;finanzierungs&shy;gesetz</p> </div>

#example-paragraphs { background-color: white; overflow: hidden; resize: horizontal; width: 9rem; border: 2px dashed #999; }

Attributes

This element only includes the global attributes.

Notes

On UTF-8 encoded pages, <wbr> behaves like the U+200B ZERO-WIDTH SPACE code point. In particular, it behaves like a Unicode bidi BN code point, meaning it has no effect on bidi-ordering: <div dir=rtl>123,<wbr>456</div> displays, when not broken on two lines, 123,456 and not 456,123.

For the same reason, the <wbr> element does not introduce a hyphen at the line break point. To make a hyphen appear only at the end of a line, use the soft hyphen character entity () instead.

Examples

The Yahoo Style Guide recommends breaking a URL before punctuation, to avoid leaving a punctuation mark at the end of the line, which the reader might mistake for the end of the URL.

html

<p> http://this<wbr />.is<wbr />.a<wbr />.really<wbr />.long<wbr />.example<wbr />.com/With<wbr />/deeper<wbr />/level<wbr />/pages<wbr />/deeper<wbr />/level<wbr />/pages<wbr />/deeper<wbr />/level<wbr />/pages<wbr />/deeper<wbr />/level<wbr />/pages<wbr />/deeper<wbr />/level<wbr />/pages </p>

Result

Technical summary

Content categories	Flow content, phrasing content.
Permitted content	Empty
Tag omission	Must have a start tag and must not have an end tag.
Permitted parents	Any element that accepts phrasing content.
Implicit ARIA role	No corresponding role
Permitted ARIA roles	Any
DOM interface	`HTMLElement`

Specifications

Specification
HTML # the-wbr-element