Maxlength for Div and Span elements

Question

How to set max length for Span and Div elements ?

Answer 1

There are the

max-height / max-width

CSS properties that will limit the width for block level elements (i.e. not spans). Reference

Note that they are not supported by IE 6.

Answer 2

input and textarea html tags have maxlength attribute but div and span element don't have. To restrict user from entering more characters compare to maxlength in span or div element, you can do following using javascript and jquery:

You can add keydown event listener on div or span element and add following functions in event listener.

1: Using javascript substring method.

$("#div-element").on("keydown", function () {
    var value = $("#div-element").val();
    if (value.length > maxlength) {
        $("#div-element").val(value.substring(0, maxlength));
    }
}());

2: Returning false on event.

$("#div-element").on("keydown", function () {
    var value = $("#div-element").val();
    if (value.length > maxlength) {
        return false;
    }
}());

These both have followup issues which should be handled as well ie substring method change the cursor position, in keydown method we need to check which key is pressed, otherwise it return false even on backspace or delete key.

Answer 3

When the word contained is too large the div or span may overflow:

<div style="width: 80px; overflow: hidden;" >hhhhhhheeeeeellllllllllooooo</div>

• You can wrap a span with a div. It will cut the content if there are no spaces in the text but it will prevent overflow from happening.

If long words are the problem a CSS3 solution could be:

style="width: 80; word-wrap: break-word;"