How to horizontally center a floating element of a variable width?

Assuming the element which is floated and will be centered is a div with an id="content" ...

<body>
<div id="wrap">
   <div id="content">
   This will be centered
   </div>
</div>
</body>

And apply the following CSS:

#wrap {
    float: left;
    position: relative;
    left: 50%;
}

#content {
    float: left;
    position: relative;
    left: -50%;
}

Here is a good reference regarding that.

.center {
  display: table;
  margin: auto;
}

You can use fit-content value for width.

#wrap {
  width: -moz-fit-content;
  width: -webkit-fit-content;
  width: fit-content;
  margin: auto;   
}

Note: It works only in latest browsers.

This works better when the id = container (which is the outer div) and id = contained (which is the inner div). The problem with the highly recommended solution is that it results in some cases into an horizontal scrolling bar when the browser is trying to cater for the left: -50% attribute. There is a good reference for this solution

        #container {
            text-align: center;
        }
        #contained {
            text-align: left;
            display: inline-block;
        }

Say you have a DIV you want centred horizontally:

 <div id="foo">Lorem ipsum</div>

In the CSS you'd style it with this:

#foo
{
  margin:0 auto; 
  width:30%;
}

Which states that you have a top and bottom margin of zero pixels, and on either left or right, automatically work out how much is needed to be even.

Doesn't really matter what you put in for the width, as long as it's there and isn't 100%. Otherwise you wouldn't be setting the centre on anything.

But if you float it, left or right, then the bets are off since that pulls it out of the normal flow of elements on the page and the auto margin setting won't work.

How to horizontally center a floating element of a variable width?

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