css class for limiting characters on line

I apologise if this has already been asked and covered but Ive just done a search and it turned up nothing.

What Im trying to do is create a css class so that when I get an amount of text return from a db that I can format it so that I have a certain amount of characters on one line before it creates a new line.

What is happening presently is that the data is formatted and it is stretching the table out of line with the format of the page.

Thanks for any help

Chris

here is a screenshot to demonstrate what I mean. Notice the text has gone out of the table on the right.

this is after a friend suggested using some css code within a <div> tag:



the image shows what I mean.

thanks

found what the issue was.....

somehow Dreamweaver had inserted a "nowrap" tag into the first [main] table tag and theis was effecting all the code.