How to do a `float: left` with no wrapping?

I have a container box1 that has a certain width (which might change depending on its content). That box contains box2 which has a fixed width (it could be an icon). Next to box2, I have box3 with some text. I want the text to use all the space available to the right of box2. With the HTML pasted below, you get:

So far so good. If the text gets longer, it doesn't wrap around box2 (which is what I want), however, it doesn't make box1 grow, which is my problem. You'll tell me "hey, if you made box3 a position: absolute, how could you expect it to make box1 grow?". Well, I don't but then, how can I get box3 to show next to box2, use all the horizontal space available, and make box1 grow if necessary? (Do I need to say that I'd like this work on IE6 onward, and to avoid using a table?)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
        <style type="text/css">
            #box1 { position: relative }
            #box3 { position: absolute; left: 2.5em; right: .5em; top: .5em }

            /* Styling */
            #box1 { background: #ddd; padding: 1em 0.5em; width: 20em }
            #box2 { background: #999; padding: .5em; }
            #box3 { background: #bbb; padding: .5em; }
            body  { font-family: sans-serif }
        </style>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="box1">
            <span id="box2">2</span>
            <span id="box3">3</span>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

You need box 3 to be a block level element, so use display:block and then toss in an overflow:hidden in conjunction with float-ing box 2:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
        <style type="text/css">
            #box1 {  }
            #box2 { float:left; }
            #box3 { display:block;overflow:hidden; }

            /* Styling */
            #box1 { background: #ddd; padding: 1em 0.5em; width: 20em }
            #box2 { background: #999; padding: .5em; }
            #box3 { background: #bbb; padding: .5em; }
            body  { font-family: sans-serif }

        </style>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        </script>
        <title>How to do a `float: left` with no wrapping?</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="box1">
            <span id="box2">2</span>
            <span id="box3">3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br />3<br /></span>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Amazing all the things overflow:hidden can do :D

There are a couple of ways to achieve this. Two common ones is either to have an empty element right after with a clear: both like so (inline css just for demo):

<span class="box1">...</span>
<br style="clear:both"/>

Another way is to use overflow: hidden like so:

<span class="box1" style="overflow: hidden">...</span>

However, there are problems with both of these solutions. With the first one you add unnecessary and ugly markup. And with the second if you want something to be positioned outside of your box (like a position: absolute) it won't be visible.

A more common, modern solution is to use the ::after pseudo-element and clear that like so:

.box1::after {
    content: '';
    display: table;
    clear: both;
}

I'd recommend the following:

#box1
{
    position: relative; /* or some other positioned value */
}

#box2
{
    width: 10px;
    height: 10px;
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
}

#box3
{
    margin-left: 10px;
}

If #box2 is of a fixed size, you can simply use a margin for #box3 to prevent its overlapping of #box2, and since it's not positioned, #box1 will grow as #box3 grows.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5710417/how-to-do-a-float-left-with-no-wrapping

标签

css

css-position

css-float