After having asked this question in the DB section and being adived to ask it here, here is my problem: I have the problem, that I have a long text that is being read from a database. The text itself is just a one liner. The problem is that it needs to be broken at exactly 80 chars even when in the middle of a word. HTML or other languages will make the line break if the next word doesn't fit in the remaining chars and that is not what I want. The pages are done in jsf. Exp.: textarea= cols: 8 rows: 3 input= break these texts normal: break these texts what I need: break th ese text s Any ideas on how I can do this? Thanks for any help in advance.