How to limit a table cell to one line of text using CSS?

I have a table of users where each row contains their names, e-mail address, and such. For some users this row is one text line high, for some others two, etc. But I would like that each row of the table be one text line high, truncating the rest.

I saw these two questions:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2779779/a-column-of-a-table-needs-to-stay-in-one-line-html-css-javascript
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1318108/css-limit-element-to-1-line

In fact my question is exactly similar to the first one, but since the link is dead I can't study it. Both answers say to use white-space: nowrap. However this doesn't work, maybe I'm missing something.

Since I can't show you the code, I reproduced the problem:

<style type="text/css">
td {
	white-space: nowrap;
	overflow: hidden;
	width: 125px;
	height: 25px;
}
</style>

<div style="width:500px">
<table>
	<tr>
		<td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
		<td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
		<td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
		<td>lorem ipsum here... blablablablablablablablablabla</td>
	</tr>
</table>
</div>

Without white-space the table is 500px wide, and the text takes more than one line.

But white-space: nowrap makes the browser simply ignore the width directive and increase the width of the table until all data fits in one line.

What am I doing wrong?

Add the following code to your stylesheet:

table { 
  white-space: nowrap;
}

overflow will only work if it knows where to start considering it overflown. You need to set the width and height attribute of the <td>

TAKE 2

Try adding table-layout: fixed; width:500px; to the table's style.

UPDATE 3

confirmed this worked: http://jsfiddle.net/e3Eqn/

Add the following to your stylesheet:

table{
     width: 500px; table-layout:fixed;
}

You need to add the table width to ensure that the next property will fit the elements to the specified size. The table-layout property here forces the browser to use a fixed layout within the 500 pixels it's given.

  <table border="1" style="width:200px">
<tr>
    <td>Column 1</td><td>Column 2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
   <td nowrap="nowrap">
    
		Single line cell just do it</td>
   <td>
	
		multiple lines here just do it</div></td>
</tr>
</table>

Simple And Useful. use above code for

<table border="1" style="width:200px">
  <tr>
    <td>Column 1</td>
    <td>Column 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td nowrap="nowrap">Single line cell just do it</td>
    <td>multiple lines here just do it</td>
  </tr>
</table>