How can I use a carriage return in a HTML tooltip?

Question

I'm currently adding verbose tooltips to our site, and I'd like (without having to resort to a whizz-bang jQuery plugin, I know there are many!) to use carriage returns to format the tooltip.

To add the tip I'm using the title attribute. I've looked around the usual sites and using the basic template of:

<a title='Tool?Tip?On?New?Line'>link with tip</a>

I've tried replacing the ? with:

• <br />
• &013; / 

• \r\n
• Environment.NewLine (I'm using C#)

None of the above works. Is it possible?

Answer 1

It’s so simple you’ll kick yourself: just press Enter!

<a href="#" title='Tool
Tip
On
New
Line'>link with tip</a>

Answer 2

The latest specification allows line feed character, so a simple line break inside the attribute or entity 
 (note that characters # and ; are required) are OK.

Answer 3

Try character 10. It won't work in Firefox though. :(

The text is displayed (if at all) in a browser dependent manner. Small tooltips work on most browsers. Long tooltips and line breaking work in IE and Safari (use 
 or 
 for a new newline). Firefox and Opera do not support newlines. Firefox does not support long tooltips.

http://modp.com/wiki/htmltitletooltips

Update:

As of January 2015 Firefox does support using 
 to insert a line break in an HTML title attribute. See the snippet example below.

<a href="#" title="Line 1&#13;Line 2&#13;Line 3">Hover for multi-line title</a>

Answer 4

Tested this in IE, Chrome, Safari, Firefox (latest versions 2012-11-27):



Works in all of them...

Answer 5

Also worth mentioning, if you are setting the title attribute with Javascript like this:

divElement.setAttribute("title", "Line one
Line two");

It won't work. You have to replace that ASCII decimal 10 to a ASCII hexadecimal A in the way it's escaped with Javascript. Like this:

divElement.setAttribute("title", "Line one\x0ALine two");

Answer 6

As of Firefox 12 they now support line breaks using the line feed HTML entity: 


<span title="First line&#10;Second line">Test</span>

This works in IE and is the correct according to the HTML5 spec for the title attribute.

Answer 7

If you are using jQuery :

$(td).attr("title", "One \n Two \n Three");

will work.

tested in IE-9 : working.

Answer 8

As a contribution to the 
 solution, we can also use &#009 for tabs if you ever need to do something like this.

<button title="My to-do list:&#013;&#009;-Item 2&#013;&#009;-Item 3&#013;&#009;-Item 4&#013;&#009;&#009;-Subitem 1">TEST</button>

Demo

Answer 9

On Chrome 79, 
 does not work anymore.

I was successful with:




This works in all major browsers.

Answer 10


 will work on all majors browsers (IE included)

Answer 11

I know I'm late to the party, but for those that just want to see this working, here's a demo: http://jsfiddle.net/rzea/vsp6840b/3/

HTML used:

<a href="#" title="First Line&#013;Second Line">Multiline Tooltip</a>
<br>
<br>
<a href="#" title="List:
  • List item here
  • Another list item here
  • Aaaand another list item, lol">Unordered list tooltip</a>

Answer 12


 <----- This is the text needed to insert Carry Return.

Answer 13

We had a requirement where we needed to test all of these, here is what I wish to share

document.getElementById("tooltip").setAttribute("title", "Tool\x0ATip\x0AOn\x0ANew\x0ALine")

<p title='Tool
Tip
On
New
Line'>Tooltip with <pre>
  new 
  line</pre> Works in all browsers</p>
<hr/>

<p title="Tool&#13;Tip&#13;On&#13;New&#13;Line">Tooltip with <code>&amp;#13;</code> Not works Firefox browsers</p>
<hr/>

<p title='Tool&#10;Tip&#10;On&#10;New&#10;Line'>Tooltip with <code>&amp;#10;</code> Works in some browsers</p>
<hr/>

<p title='Tool&#x0aTip&#x0aOn&#x0aNew&#x0aLine'>Tooltip with <code>&amp;#xD;</code> May work in some browsers</p>
<hr/>

<p id='tooltip'>Tooltip with <code>document.getElementById("tooltip").setAttribute("title", "Tool\x0ATip\x0AOn\x0ANew\x0ALine")</code> May work in some browsers</p>
<hr/>


<p title="List:
  • List item here
  • Another list item here
  • Aaaand another list item, lol">Tooltip with <code>• </code>Unordered list tooltip</p>
<hr/>


<p title='Tool\nTip\nOn\nNew\nLine'>Tooltip with <code>\n</code> May not work in modern browsers</p>
<hr/>

<p title='Tool\tTip\tOn\tNew\tLine'>Tooltip with <code>\t</code> May not work in modern browsers</p>
<hr/>

<p title='Tool&#013;Tip&#013;On&#013;New&#013;Line'>Tooltip with <code>&amp;#013;</code> Works in most browsers</p>
<hr/>

Fiddle

Answer 14

This 
 should work if you just use a simple title attribute.

on bootstrap popovers, just use data-html="true" and use html in the data-content attribute .

<div title="Hello &#013;World">hover here</div>

Answer 15

I don't believe it is. Firefox 2 trims long link titles anyway and they should really only be used to convey a small amount of help text. If you need more explanation text I would suggest that it belongs in a paragraph associated with the link. You could then add the tooltip javascript code to hide those paragraphs and show them as tooltips on hover. That's your best bet for getting it to work cross-browser IMO.

Answer 16

On Chrome 16, and possibly earlier versions, you can use "\n". As a sidenote, "\t" also works

Answer 17

As for whom 
 didn't work you have to style the element on which lines are visible in as : white-space: pre-line;

Referenced from this Answer : https://stackoverflow.com/a/17172412/1460591

Answer 18

Just use this:

<a title='Tool&#x0aTip&#x0aOn&#x0aNew&#x0aLine'>link with tip</a>

You can add new line on title by using this &#x0a.

Answer 19

Just use JavaScript. Then compatible with most and older browsers. Use the escape sequence \n for newline.

   document.getElementById("ElementID").title = 'First Line text \n Second line text'

Answer 20

From the information available on accessibility and the use of tooltips making them larger with the use of CR or line break is appreciated, the fact that the various browsers cannot/will not agree on basics shows that they don't much care about accessibility.

Answer 21

According to this article on the w3c website:

CDATA is a sequence of characters from the document character set and may include character entities. User agents should interpret attribute values as follows:

• Replace character entities with characters,
• Ignore line feeds,
• Replace each carriage return or tab with a single space.

This means that (at least) CR and LF won't work inside title attribute. I suggest that you use a tooltip plugin. Most of these plugins allow arbitrary HTML to be displayed as an element's tooltip.

Answer 22

Much nicer looking tooltips can be created manually, and can include HTML formatting.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<style>
.tooltip {
    position: relative;
    display: inline-block;
    border-bottom: 1px dotted black;
}

.tooltip .tooltiptext {
    visibility: hidden;
    width: 120px;
    background-color: #555;
    color: #fff;
    text-align: center;
    border-radius: 6px;
    padding: 5px 0;
    position: absolute;
    z-index: 1;
    bottom: 125%;
    left: 50%;
    margin-left: -60px;
    opacity: 0;
    transition: opacity 0.3s;
}

.tooltip .tooltiptext::after {
    content: "";
    position: absolute;
    top: 100%;
    left: 50%;
    margin-left: -5px;
    border-width: 5px;
    border-style: solid;
    border-color: #555 transparent transparent transparent;
}

.tooltip:hover .tooltiptext {
    visibility: visible;
    opacity: 1;
}
</style>
<body style="text-align:center;">

<h2>Tooltip</h2>
<p>Move the mouse <a href="#" title="some text
more&#13;&#10;and then some">over</a> the text below:</p>

<div class="tooltip">Hover over me
<span class="tooltiptext">Tooltip text
some <b>more</b><br/>
<i>and</i> more</span>
</div>

<div class="tooltip">Each tooltip is independent
<span class="tooltiptext">Other tooltip text
some more<br/>
and more</span>
</div>

</body>
</html>

This is taken from the w3schools post on this. Experiment with the above code here.

Answer 23

Razor Syntax

In the case of ASP.NET MVC you can just store the title as a variable as use \r\n and it'll work.

@{ 
    var logTooltip = "Sunday\r\nMonday\r\netc.";
}

<h3 title="@logTooltip">Logs</h3>

Answer 24

hack but works - (tested on chrome and mobile)

just add no break spaces   till it breaks - you might have to limit the tooltip size depending on the amount of content but for small text messages this works:

   etc

Tried everything above and this is the only thing that worked for me -

Answer 25

I have tried with " " to display title text in new line and it's work like a charm

Answer 26

I am on firefox 68.7.0esr and the 
 doesn't work. Breaking the lines via <CR> did work so I am going with that since it simple and forward. i.e.

<option title="Constraint PSC/SCS/Activity
Definition Constraint Checker
Database Start Notifier">CnCk

Answer 27

The "just press enter" solution didn't worked here, so the good old vanilla js seems a pretty efficient and clean way.

function customTitle(event, textHeader, text){
    let eventOrigin = event.target || event.srcElement;
    eventOrigin.title = textHeader + '\n\n' + text;
}

And on element onmouseover

onmouseover="customTitle(event, 'Some Caput', 'Some more or less complete description');"

Voila! Works on chrome and firefox (which does not exclude others, i just didn't checked it).

Answer 28

use data-html="true" and apply <br>.