Comments on: Three Quick Ways to Avoid Widows

By: Tom J Nowell

Tom J Nowell — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:54:19 +0000

Apologies for being a stickler, but these aren’t widows, they’re orphans.

A widow is a line of a paragraph that is too long that gets pushed onto the following page, resulting in a single line at the top of the next page.

An orphan is a single word that is pushed off the end of a line by word wrapping and ends up on its own on the following line.

Again sorry for being a pedant!

By: herostwist

herostwist — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:27:10 +0000

i use .replace(/\s+([^\s]+)\s*/, ‘&nbdp;$1′) this regex copes with all punctuation and special charcters and also trailing spaces before closing tags.

By: Marc

Marc — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:05:52 +0000

I’ve had some trouble with this script messing with img tags inside p tags. I’ve been using the following to avoid it but its not great because it just ignores paragraphs that have images…

$('p:not(p:has(img))').html(function(i,html){ return html.replace(/ (\S+)$/,' $1'); });

but works for most things..
*note* requires jquery 1.4

By: jQuery — Toutes les femmes sont folles | de Q | 10 + -- css 4 design

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:06:10 +0000

[...] site Learning jQuery propose trois méthodes pour appliquer un espace insécable entre les deux derniers mots d’un titre pour [...]

By: DLF (Dark LIfeform)

DLF (Dark LIfeform) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:20:34 +0000

Thanks for the great article. It really helped me in one of my projects.

By: jhoysi

jhoysi — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:44:40 +0000

Oh, I’m so happy this was pointed out! I was just getting worried that all my links were becoming plain text when I implemented this, but this little change solved it all!

Great script, thanks! =)

By: Maverick » Come correggere gli “a capo” con jQuery

Maverick » Come correggere gli “a capo” con jQuery — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:55:02 +0000

[...] Nel mio caso ho trovato molto utile questo articolo: http://www.learningjquery.com/2008/07/three-quick-ways-to-avoid-widows [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:28:59 +0000

I just noticed that this does not work if the last word is a link.

Does anyone know how to fix that?

By: Karl Swedberg

Karl Swedberg — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:51:23 +0000

Hi Andrew, A quick way to do that with a regular expression would be :


$('p.someclass').each(function() {
  var original = $(this).html();
  $(this).html( original.replace(/-/g, '—') );
});

Keep in mind, though, that this will mess up IDs or class names that have hyphens in them, if they're in those paragraphs. I don't have time to work out how to avoid that at the moment, but if someone else would like to give it a shot, go for it. :)

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:02:35 +0000

This is a great tip! I am glad that I found this….

What if I wanted to change all hyphens to em dashes? And better yet in a specified paragraph class?

Is this possible? How would you do that?