no, usually the browser will expand the table to fit the text in it if there are really long words. that's the problem mpegman seems to be having. eg,
<table width="2" border="1">
<tr><td>looooooooooooooong</td></tr>
</table>
gives you:
certainly not 2 pixels wide.
if you're working on a more liquid layout, you could modify one of the regexps given to substitute in a <wbr /> tag instead of a space. that tells the browser that if it needs to wrap text, that's a good spot to do it in. but if it doesn't need to wrap the text, you won't end up with a space in the middle of the word.
anders pearson