How to Make an Expanding Code Box with jQuery

Posted · Category: Code, License Free

On blogs that like to share snippets of code, it is common to use the <pre> tag to wrap the code so that the spacing/indenting is maintained and long lines do not wrap. While this is desirable behavior, it can be undesirable to have those un-wrapped lines break out of their containers awkwardly and overlap other content.

On Digging Into WordPress, they taught us How to Make an Expanding Code Box by using JavaScript (jQuery) to solve this problem. One solution could potentially be to use only CSS and expand the width with something like pre:hover, but JavaScript is more elegant. It expands only when needed. It expands only to as wide as needed. And also, it expands with animation.