Centering a div block without the width

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I have a problem when I try to center the div block "products" because I don't know in advance the div width. Anybody have a solution?

Update: The problem I have is I don't know how many products I'll display, I can have 1, 2 or 3 products, I can center them if it was a fixed number as I'd know the width of the parent div, I just don't know how to do it when the content is dynamic.

.product_container {
  text-align: center;
  height: 150px;
}

.products {
  height: 140px;
  text-align: center;
  margin: 0 auto;
  clear: ccc both; 
}
.price {
  margin: 6px 2px;
  width: 137px;
  color: #666;
  font-size: 14pt;
  font-style: normal;
  border: 1px solid #CCC;
  background-color: #EFEFEF;
}
<div class="product_container">
  <div class="products" id="products">
    <div id="product_15">
      <img src="/images/ecommerce/card_default.png">
      <div class="price">R$ 0,01</div>
    </div>

    <div id="product_15">
      <img src="/images/ecommerce/card_default.png">
      <div class="price">R$ 0,01</div>
    </div>   

    <div id="product_15">
      <img src="/images/ecommerce/card_default.png">
      <div class="price">R$ 0,01</div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

css html
22 Answers

An element with ‘display: block’ (as div is by default) has a width determined by the width of its container. You can't make a block's width dependent on the width of its contents (shrink-to-fit).

(Except for blocks that are ‘float: left/right’ in CSS 2.1, but that's no use for centering.)

You could set the ‘display’ property to ‘inline-block’ to turn a block into a shrink-to-fit object that can be controlled by its parent's text-align property, but browser support is spotty. You can mostly get away with it by using hacks (eg. see -moz-inline-stack) if you want to go that way.

The other way to go is tables. This can be necessary when you have columns whose width really can't be known in advance. I can't really tell what you're trying to do from the example code — there's nothing obvious in there that would need a shrink-to-fit block — but a list of products could possibly be considered tabular.

[PS. never use ‘pt’ for font sizes on the web. ‘px’ is more reliable if you really need fixed size text, otherwise relative units like ‘%’ are better. And “clear: ccc both” — a typo?]

.center{
   text-align:center; 
}

.center > div{ /* N.B. child combinators don't work in IE6 or less */
   display:inline-block;
}

JSFiddle

user_189360

By default, div elements are displayed as block elements, so they have 100% width, making centering them meaningless. As suggested by Arief, you must specify a width and you can then use auto when specifying margin in order to center a div.

Alternatively, you could also force display: inline, but then you'd have something that pretty much behaves like a span instead of a div, so that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Adam_Bellaire_216320

I'm afraid the only way to do this without explicitly specifying the width is to use (gasp) tables.

fallen888_223030

This is one way to center anything within a div not know the inner width of the elements.

#product_15{
    position: relative;
    margin: 0 auto;
    display: table;
}
.price, img{
    position: absolute;
    top: 50%;
    left: 50%;
    transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
}
user_49373530

add this css to your product_container class

    margin: 0px auto;
    padding: 0px;
    border:0;
    width: 700px;
Arief_Iman_Santoso_340960
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