Text does not wrap into table of fixed width

[Mr_Alien]

I have the following HTML for a table with 3 columns:

<TABLE cellSpacing="0" cellPadding="5" border="1" width="670">
<tr>
<td class="heading">Notice Title:</td>
<td class="heading">Composed By:</td>
<td class="heading">Posted On:</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td class="rows" width="350"><?php echo $messageTitle; ?></td>
<td class="rows" width="200"><a href="<?php echo $authorsLink; ?>"><?php echo $authorsName; ?></a></td>
<td class="rows" width="120"><font size="2"><?php echo $messageDate; ?></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td colspan="3" class="heading"><div align="center">Message:</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td colspan="3" class="rows"><div align="left"><?php echo $rowdata["message"]; ?></td>
</tr>
</table>

Everything seems straight forward, except if the $rowdata["message"] field that is written in the last row contains a very long line of text, the table becomes the length of the line of text.

Since the width of cells are given, and the width of the table is given, the message cell should not widen the table, even though it is a colspan of the 3 cells above. But it does.

What do I need to do, to make the text wrap into the cell?

Thanks

[Mr_Alien]

The reason why:

....was because in testing I was entering about 5 lines of text as "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"..etc which to IE is classed as one word

It DOES usually wrap, unless like in my case, the text is classed as just one word (there are no spaces between the 5 lines of "aaaa"). If this is the case, the width of the table falls over.

This seems to be a deficciency of IE, which should really be able to wrap text even if it is one word.

So the next question is, how can I validate the user input $message to ensure that there is not a single word in the text, that is over 30 characters long???

Cheers

[intenz]

Try wordwrap(); 😉

[Mr_Alien]

Hmm, Wordwrap(); would only work if I knew how many characters fit into the table.

But since I want to be able to change font/size and so on as the project develops, the amount of characters which fits into the table will vary.

I think it would be better if I could use javascript to just check that the words in the string are not over 30 characters.

So off to a javascript forum...unless anyone here can help.
Cheers.