Pete FreitagWidon't and Widows
By Pete Freitag
Shaun Innman posted about a technique he call's Widon't, for dealing with the widow problem on the web.
The widow problem is when you have a single word on a line by itself, at the end of a headline or paragraph. In typesetting this word is called a widow.
For example:
Man Walks On Moon
Moon is the widow in the above example. Shaun fixes this by replacing the last space with an He provides a function in PHP, but here's a simple regular expression for ColdFusion to do the same:
ReReplace(headline, " ([^ ]+)$", " \1")
It can get a bit trickier to fix this at the end of paragraphs, here's another regular expression that might work for that (need to test more):
ReReplace(text, " ([^ ]+\r?\n)", " \1", "ALL")
Widon't and Widows was first published on September 05, 2006.
If you like reading about text, type, typesetting, regex, rereplace, widows, or widont then you might also like:
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