How to underline blank space in CSS? - html

Question

I am making a report that should be printable from the web browser. At the bottom is a field for the recipient to fill in, so it's underlined. I would rather not have to eyeball a certain number of underscores, and they seem to have gaps in them anyway.
What I am going for is...
Amount Paid: $ ___________________
So far, I have managed this CSS:
<div>
<p style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;">
Amount Paid: $
</p>
</div>
That draws a line to the edge of the parent div - which I want. However, it also draws a line under "Amount Paid: $", which I don't want. Every combination of ps, spans, etc. I've thought of has failed:
If I put the text in a span that nukes the border, it doesn't matter, I suppose since it's still part of the p and the border is still drawn.
I can add the underline to a span after text, but that doesn't work. It only seems to want to underline the blank space when the border style is in the p element.
Likewise, if I replace the p with a span it doesn't get the memo that it should extend the border all the way:
<p>
<span>Amount Paid: $ </span>
<span style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;"> </span>
</p>
Does nothing. The line is never drawn. If I add a letter to the second span, it's drawn under that, but no more. And if I replace the p with anything else like divs or spans, it doesn't seem to work either...
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Change the display (CSS) of the second span to inline-block and set its width (CSS).
upd:
Or try something like:
<p style="width: 200px; display: table;">
<span style="display: table-cell; width: 100px;">Amount Paid: $ </span>
<span style="display: table-cell; border-bottom: 1px solid black;"></span>
</p>

Answer 2

This works in the year 2014.
Amount Paid: $ <span style="text-decoration: underline; white-space: pre;"> </span>

Answer 3

Another one solution using disply: flex; and flex-grow:
.container {
width: 200px;
}
.row {
display: flex;
}
.underline {
flex-grow: 1;
border-bottom: 1px solid black;
margin-left: 5px;
}
<div class='container'>
<div class='row'>
<div class='label'>Count:</div>
<div class='underline'></div>
</div>
<div class='row'>
<div class='label'>Amount Paid:</div>
<div class='underline'></div>
</div>
</div>

Answer 4

If you don't mind manually specifying the width of the line, you can do this:
<span style="border-bottom: 1px solid black; padding-left: 50px"> </span>

Answer 5

If you're not worried about support for older browsers (IE6 generation), there's always using the min-width property to get a default amount of blank space that expands as necessary.
<p>
<span>Amount Paid: $ </span>
<span style="border-bottom: 1px solid black; min-width: 100px;"> </span>
</p>
Note that for IE7, you'd have to add an overflow: visible to the min-width element so that it treats min-width properly, as opposed to it's default (buggy) behavior of treating it as width.

Answer 6

Or just add non-breaking space characters like so:
<h1>STRONG   </h1>
css:
h1 {
text-decoration: underline;
}
add as many as you like to increase width of your underline.