How to avoid line breaks inside `->` operator in `<code>` blocks?

Question

I have a large HTML document containing C++ inline <code> sequences like foo->bar . Because hyphens are often used to induce line breaks, this sometimes results in output like:

blah blah foo-
>bar blah blah

which is undesirable.

• Replacing the - (U+002D) with a ‑ (U+2011; non-breaking hyphen) isn't acceptable because it breaks searching for -> in common browsers.
• Styling <code> elements with white-space:nowrap is undesirable because some inline code segments are long enough that they really should wrap.
• Manually styling each -> operator with <span style="white-space:nowrap"> (or <nobr> ) is unacceptable because of the editorial burden, but it's possible to write a script to do this.

Is there a declarative way to specify that inside -> isn't a good place to break a line?

(This question is not actually a duplicate of How can I use CSS to preserve line breaks in an HTML <code> block? : this question asks how to avoid line breaks, while that question asks how to create them.)

Answer 1

No css declarative way by now. As far as I know there is no defined format for dictionaries to be used with hyphenate-resource (or @hyphenate-resource) or wide support for it, even using vendor specific dictionaries...

Use spans and script it as you pointed: but it's possible to write a script to do this

It's not a perfect solution, but it satisfies all your criteria and it is crossbrowser