Hi,
I have long lines of text stored in a DB without line breaks. Now I need to present it in fixed width with word wrap. I tried everything css (word-wrap: break-word;), the rails actionview helper (word_wrap), specifying width of the div etc. But nothing works. The reason I'm asking the question here because to me word_wrap was created to solve this exact problem but it is failing to do so. Correct me if i'm wrong.
Regards Manu
Do they have white space between the words? Silly question, but it sounds strange that what you're doing already doesn't work.
The following post shows how to split long words (Gregory's code is much nicer then mine) http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_frm/thread/c67dd3750aaca3cc/f2e280d1e2f6cd19?lnk=st&q=&rnum=19#f2e280d1e2f6cd19
Bart
Unfortunately that did not solve the problem :(. That code splits strings. In my case I have a paragraph on a single line without line breaks. Yes the words have white spaces between them :).
Regards Manu
This is strange indeed. Can you give an example of text which doesn't wrap. It's really a basic thing in a browser. How is your text field defined, how is it pulled and presented via Rails? Do you have it online we can see? I feel there's something else that's screwing it up.
Bart
Solved 
I was putting together a simple app to demonstrate this and the bug disappeared. Then I went and dug deeper. One of the parent elements was setting white-space: nowrap. I was not familiar with the css and was certainly not aware of the white-space attribute. Sorry for wasting your time.
Regards Manu
Glad you got it working.. Bart