text-align property

Specifies whether the text in the object is left-aligned, right-aligned, centered, or justified.

Syntax

text-align: left | right | center | justify

Property values

A variable of type String that specifies or receives one of the following values:

left: Default. Text is aligned to the left.
right: Text is aligned to the right.
center: Text is centered.
justify: Text is justified.

CSS information

Applies To	All elements
Media	visual
Inherited	1
Initial Value

Standards information

CSS 2.1, Section 5.4.6

Remarks

The property applies to block elements. The property is inherited by all block-level objects inside a div object. This parameter receives null if the attribute is not set.

The justify possible value is available as of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0.

Examples

The following examples use the text-align attribute and the text-align property to align text within the object.

This example uses p as a selector and two classes to call an embedded style sheet that aligns the text according to the respective rule.

Code example: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/dhtml/refs/text-align.htm

HTML


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<head>
  <title>text-align</title>
  <style>
    p {
      text-align: center;
    }

    .align1 {
      text-align: right;
    }

    .align2 {
      text-align: left;
    }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
  <p onclick="this.className='align1'" ondblclick="this.className='align2'">
    The text is aligned to the center using <strong>p</strong> as<br>
    the HTML selector in the stylesheet.<br>
    Click the text to align right.<br>
    Double-click to align left.
  </p>
</body>

</html>

This example uses inline scripting to change the alignment of the text when an onmouseover event occurs.

Code example: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/dhtml/refs/textAlign.htm