mrynit

then restrict the size of user input to a fixed value.
or how ever the input is done

DaWei

Just because you don't want a long piece of garbage doesn't mean you don't want to allow longer things with multiple words. Besides, 'size' is a control-sizing doo-dad, I think you probably meant maxlength.

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Writlaus

DaWei is correct. I want to have the phrases be at most 150 characters long, but I still want to be able to stop any insanely long words from messing up my tables.

I wish there were some line-breaking techniques like ­ and "word-wrap:break-word" that worked in Firefox.

DaWei

Well, you know what they say about wishing in one hand and...ahhhh nemmine. Seriously, think about this for a second. Almost universally, a browser renders what it received from the server as a response. One exception is form fields. If a user enters lebenty-zillion Ws into a form field and never hits 'submit', who's to know? If the form is submitted, the contents of the field are available to the form-processing software. That means this dastardly entry may be discarded, broken into appropriate lengths, or used to drive the hard-disk head up against the stops and make grinding sounds until the janitor goes crazy and hits the server with a mop. The fact that there's nothing 'universal' to handle this on the browser end probably means you're the third person to be seriously concerned about it. Fix it on the server side and wait for enough other people to go gray.

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Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

mrynit

@Writlaus
...wait a sec...if you know PHP shouldnt you know how to handle things like this?

Writlaus

mrynit, I said in a previous post in this thread that I would rather not use the wordwrap(); function because it makes decisions based on numbers of characters rather than physical lenght in pixels of the formatted string.

mrynit

1. why cant you limit the number of characters to prevent such long stings that cause this problem??

2. dont use wordwrap(); if it doesnt work. develope your own way of handling really long strings using server side w/e you want.

3. :banana:

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lectricpharaoh

I don't think there is any standard HTML method to do what you want, and as you mention, you cannot reliably do it server-side, because you have no way of knowing exactly what size and shape font the client will render in. Even without the client substituting a different font, they may be altering the size, and some fonts don't scale quite linearly (not to mention the server is oblivious that such scaling has happened).

So, you're left with two options as I see it. First, you can forget about it, and just let it mess up the tables when it occurs. Second, you can do it server-side, and just accept that in some situations, it will be sub-optimal.

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Writlaus

Yeah... I guess I'm going to have to use wordwrap(); or something like it afterall. If anyone has any other suggestions, go ahead and post 'em, but for now I'll start working on it server-side.

EDIT: Just to let everyone know, all I'm really looking for is a way to stop a long word from messing up my tables.

mrynit

find the standar deviation of the number of spaces for every 150 characters. if some one enters a string that is an outlier or how ever you want to determin than reject it. log the ip's of the ppl who enter regected strings so can prevent them from spaming.

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