How and why to use the break tag in Drupal

There are many situations in which you will end up creating list of content in your Drupal site. Those lists may be created by the views module, or by taxonomy, or simply the list of post on your blog. When displaying list of content, Drupal cuts the articles after a certain number of characters so that only a small portion of the content, called the teaser, will be shown to users. This default cutting point works fine for most situations, but sometimes you need a little more control over where the teaser cuts off. Hence the <!—break--> tag.

The break tag isn’t standard html, but rather a Drupal specific tag that tells it where to cut the teaser. Using it is simple just choose the point where you want the article to end and insert <!—break-->

One really, important situation where you will need to use the break tag is when adding tables to the initial part of a node. I learned this one the hard way, and I learned it well. The problem with tables at the beginning of an article is that if Drupal cuts off the text after the default number of characters it often ends up cutting the table in half, and thereby creating an unintelligible mess that can wreak havoc on your page. The solution is simple: put the break tag before or after the table so that it either doesn’t show up on the teaser at all, or so that it shows up in its entirety.