How to make a table column be a minimum width

Solution 1:

There is a trick that involves setting some cells to a very small width, and then applying a white-space: nowrap property:

<table>
    <tr>
        <td class="min">id</td>
        <td class="min">tiny</td>
        <td>Fills space</td>
        <td>Fills space</td>
        <td class="min">123</td>
        <td class="min">small</td>
        <td>Fills space, wider</td>
        <td>Fills space</td>
        <td class="min">thin</td>
    </tr>
</table>

td {
    width: auto;
}

td.min {
    width: 1%;
    white-space: nowrap;
}

Live demo

As you can also see in the above fiddle, nowrap forces the table cell to prevent any line-breaks, and thus align its width to the smallest possible.

NOTE: If you have a thead, you want to apply the td's stylings to th as well.

UPDATE #1: Ellipsis (...)

To automatically collapse a longer column into ellipses, the text-overflow: ellipsis is what you are likely looking for:

td.cell-collapse {
    max-width: 200px;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

Live demo

This also requires overflow set to hidden, as well as a width or max-width with a fixed value. Add the cell-collapse class to cells whose width you would like to limit.

UPDATE #2: Handling Bootstrap

Bootstrap's table class sets width: 100%; which will mess up this approach. You can fix that with table { width: inherit !important; }

Live demo

NOTE: The tables in this approach already have full width because table cells already have width: auto;.

Previous Javascript-base solution removed, since the pure CSS-based approach now works consistently across all modern browsers. The original code is still available at the linked JSfiddle, commented out.

Solution 2:

If you know the sizes you want your column and they are fixed, I suggest using a fixed table layout. It allows you to specify the fixed % each column takes.

Here's a link that helped me in a similar situation http://css-tricks.com/fixing-tables-long-strings/