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.
<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.
Try it
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.
<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 Standard # the-wbr-element |
Browser compatibility
Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Chrome | Edge | Firefox | Opera | Safari | Chrome Android | Firefox for Android | Opera Android | Safari on IOS | Samsung Internet | WebView Android | ||
wbr |
1 | 12 | 1 | 11.6 | 4 | 18 | 4 | 12 | 3.2 | 1.0 | 4.4 |
See also
overflow-wrap
word-break
hyphens
- The
<br>
element
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https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/wbr