how to set the length of a string

[Dura Hurtado]

Hi, I am trying to set the length of a string when it is shown inside a panel this way:

<p:panel header="m">
<div id='content'>
<p> <h:outputText value="#{Content.load}" styleClass="element"/></p>
</div>
</p:panel>

then in the .css file (styleClass="element") I´ve set the width value, this is a bizarre way of course it doesn´t works, my .css is:

.element{width: 20px;}

¿Any idea?

Thanks

[Tim Holloway]

Like I mentioned in another answer, HTML isn't a strict character-based definition language. Not only does it ignore newlines, it will remove multiple spaces when it displays a page.

A popular way of getting around this is to fake it using the "non-break space" entity ("&nbsp;"), but that's brute force.

On the other hand, you can't set width on an outputText JSF tag, because the outputText generates an HTML <span>, which doesn't support width. So what you have to do is embed the outputText in a construct that does support widths, such as a column in a table. Or, in the case that you used, a panelGrid will do:

<p:panel header="m">
   <h:panelGrid id="content" styleClass="element">
      <h:outputText value="#{content.load}" />
    </h:panelGrid>
</p:panel> 

Note that I got rid of the raw HTML tags. They're not good practice and they weren't needed anyway. I also changed the capitalization on your bean name, since as a instance variable, it should begin with an uppercase letter. That should only be done for class names.