Deprecated

See unorphan.js instead.

jQuery Unorphan

Obliterate text orphans.

$.unorphan() adjoins the last two words of any block of text to make sure that they will wrap together.

See Wikipedia for a description of text orphans.

Common usage

$(function() {
  $("p, li, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6").unorphan();
});

This changes:

<p>Apples, bananas and oranges.</p>

Into:

<p>Apples, bananas and&nbsp;oranges.</p>

Comparison to other utilities

Other similar utilities include:

• jQWidont
• Widow Fix
• Widont for WordPress.

As of time of writing, Unorphan works better than these because:

• It does not mangle HTML at all (it operates on text nodes), you can be sure that your HTML tags will always be intact.

• It does not rewrite innerHTML, causing your elements to unneededly reinitialize, and possibly losing events and data in the elements.

• It's extremely small. (400 bytes)

• It does the manipulation on the client side, making no impact to your in-page SEO efforts.

Acknowledgements

Original idea and implementation by Shawn Inman.