[html] How to prevent line-break in a column of a table cell (not a single cell)?

How can I prevent automatic line breaks in a column of table (not a single cell)?

There are a few ways to do this; none of them are the easy, obvious way.

Applying white-space:nowrap to a <col> won't work; only four CSS properties work on <col> elements - background-color, width, border, and visibility. IE7 and earlier used to support all properties, but that's because they used a strange table model. IE8 now matches everyone else.

So, how do you solve this?

Well, if you can ignore IE (including IE8), you can use the :nth-child() pseudoclass to select particular <td>s from each row. You'd use td:nth-child(2) { white-space:nowrap; }. (This works for this example, but would break if you had any rowspans or colspans involved.)

If you have to support IE, then you've got to go the long way around and apply a class to every <td> that you want to affect. It sucks, but them's the breaks.

In the long run, there are proposals to fix this lack in CSS, so that you can more easily apply styles to all the cells in a column. You'll be able to do something like td:nth-col(2) { white-space:nowrap; } and it would do what you want.

Use the nowrap style:

<td style="white-space:nowrap;">...</td>

It's CSS!

Just add

style="white-space:nowrap;"

Example:

<table class="blueTable" style="white-space:nowrap;">
   <tr>
      <td>My name is good</td>
    </tr>
 </table>

For completion sake:

#table_id td:nth-child(2)  {white-space: nowrap;}

Is used for applying a style to the 2 column of the table_id table.

This is supported by all major Browsers, IE started supporting this from IE9 onwards.

<table class="blueTable">
  <tr>
     <td>My name is good</td>
   </tr>
</table> 
<style>   
    table.blueTable td,
    table.blueTable th {
        white-space: nowrap;
        /* non-question related further styling */
        border: 1px solid #AAAAAA;
        padding: 3px 2px;
        text-align: left;
    }
</style>

This is an example usage of the white space property with value nowrap, the bluetable is the class of the table, below the table are the CSS styles.

<td style="white-space: nowrap">

The nowrap attribute I believe is deprecated. The above is the preferred way.

You can use the CSS style white-space:

white-space: nowrap;

Put non-breaking spaces in your text instead of normal spaces. On Ubuntu I do this with (Compose Key)-space-space.

To apply it to the entire table, you can place it within the table tag:

<table style="white-space:nowrap;">