Avoid too long words in a post title, post content or comment but only if its not a url

Question

I want to prevent users from posting things like "aaaadfgdfgsdfgdaaaadsfgsdfgaaasdfgdfaaadfgsdfgaaaaaaaajahkjhkahkkjkjhaa..." which would not only be annoying but would certainly break the content div when the word is longer than the div itself.

I found a neat regex which solved the problem:

$thecontent = preg_replace('/\w{40}(?=\w)/', "$0-", get_the_content());

This would place hyphens inside any word having more than 40 characters in order to force a line-break if necessary and keep the layout unharmed.

The thing is I would like to apply this only when the word is plain text but certainly not when it's a url (or an email address perhaps).

Ultimately, a url like "http://www.aaaa.com/sdfsdfdfg/sdfsdsdfs/dsdsdfs.php?var1=dfsdfsdfvar2=sdfsdf&var3=dsfsfds" should remain as it is as I believe it's automatically taken care of by wordpress (I tried and created a long url and it displayed correctly in two lines so it seems to be ok).

With the regex here above, even the url is processed which is a problem.

How can I avoid to apply that regex to (email addresses and) standard transfer protocol urls such as http, https, ftp, ftps?

PS: I tried some client-side hyphenator plugins but they just don't fit my needs.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Thank you Milo,

"word-break" alone wasn't enough as it's css3 only and not cross-browser.

But I found this:

.bloc_content{
    overflow:hidden; 
   -ms-word-break: break-all;
    word-break: break-all;
    word-break: break-word;
   -webkit-hyphens: auto;
   -moz-hyphens: auto;
    hyphens: auto;
}

It seems to to work in all cases I tested. Hopefully it would be cross-browser enough to solve the problem. Not sure if it would resist to old browsers though...