How to remove word wrap from textarea?

textarea {
  white-space: pre;
  overflow-wrap: normal;
  overflow-x: scroll;
}

white-space: nowrap also works if you don't care about whitespace, but of course you don't want that if you're working with code (or indented paragraphs or any content where there might deliberately be multiple spaces) ... so i prefer pre.

overflow-wrap: normal (was word-wrap in older browsers) is needed in case some parent has changed that setting; it can cause wrapping even if pre is set.

also -- contrary to the currently accepted answer -- textareas do often wrap by default. pre-wrap seems to be the default on my browser.


I found a way to make a textarea with all this working at the same time:

  • With horizontal scrollbar
  • Supporting multiline text
  • Text not wrapping

It works well on:

  • Chrome 15.0.874.120
  • Firefox 7.0.1
  • Opera 11.52 (1100)
  • Safari 5.1 (7534.50)
  • IE 8.0.6001.18702

Let me explain how i get to that: I was using Chrome inspector integrated tool and I saw values on CSS styles, so I try these values, instead of normal ones... trial & errors till I got it reduced to minimum and here it is for anyone that wants it.

In the CSS section I used just this for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari:

textarea {
  white-space:nowrap;
  overflow:scroll;
}

In the CSS section I used just this for IE:

textarea {
  overflow:scroll;
}

It was a bit tricky, but there is the CSS.

An (x)HTML tag like this:

<textarea id="myTextarea" rows="10" cols="15"></textarea>

And at the end of the <head> section a JavaScript like this:

 window.onload=function(){
   document.getElementById("myTextarea").wrap='off';
 }

The JavaScript is for making the W3C validator passing XHTML 1.1 Strict, since the wrap attribute is not official and thus cannot be an (x)HTML tag directly, but most browsers handle it, so after loading the page it sets that attribute.

Hope this can be tested on more browsers and versions and help someone to improve it and makes it fully cross-browser for all versions.


Textareas shouldn't wrap by default, but you can set wrap="soft" to explicitly disable wrap:

<textarea name="nowrap" cols="30" rows="3" wrap="soft"></textarea>

EDIT: The "wrap" attribute is not officially supported. I got it from the german SELFHTML page (an english source is here) that says IE 4.0 and Netscape 2.0 support it. I also tested it in FF 3.0.7 where it works as supposed. Things have changed here, SELFHTML is now a wiki and the english source link is dead.

EDIT2: If you want to be sure every browser supports it, you can use CSS to change wrap behaviour:

Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can achieve the same effect with white-space: nowrap; overflow: auto;. Thus, the wrap attribute can be regarded as outdated.

From here (seems to be an excellent page with information about textarea).

EDIT3: I'm not sure when it changed (according to the comments, must've been around 2014), but wrap is now an official HTML5 attribute, see w3schools. Changed the answer to match this.


The following CSS based solution works for me:

<html>
 <head>
  <style type='text/css'>
   textarea {
    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow:    scroll;
    overflow-y:  hidden;
    overflow-x:  scroll;
    overflow:    -moz-scrollbars-horizontal;
   }
  </style>
 </head>
 <body>
  <form>
   <textarea>This is a long line of text for testing purposes...</textarea>
  </form>
 </body>
</html>

Tags:

Html

Textarea

Word Wrap

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