CSS: borders between table columns only

I know this is an old question, but there is a simple, one line solution which works consistently for Chrome, Firefox, etc., as well as IE8 and above (and, for the most part, works on IE7 too - see http://www.quirksmode.org/css/selectors/ for details):

table td + td { border-left:2px solid red; }


The output is something like this:

Col1 | Col2 | Col3

What is making this work is that you are defining a border only on table cells which are adjacent to another table cell. In other words, you're applying the CSS to all cells in a row except the first one.

By applying a left border to the second through the last child, it gives the appearance of the line being "between" the cells.


Edit 2

Erasmus has a better one-liner below


Not without tricky css selectors and extra markup and the like.

Something like this might do (using CSS selectors):

table {
    border:none;
    border-collapse: collapse;
}

table td {
    border-left: 1px solid #000;
    border-right: 1px solid #000;
}

table td:first-child {
    border-left: none;
}

table td:last-child {
    border-right: none;
}

Edit

To clarify @jeroen's comment blow, all you'd really need is:

table { border: none; border-collapse: collapse; }
table td { border-left: 1px solid #000; }
table td:first-child { border-left: none; }

Tags:

Css