title: How to capture one line of text in a div
body: <p>I've looked around at similar SO posts related to this, but none deal with exactly what I am looking for. Say I have some text, I throw it in a div, and add some arbitrary (possibly even dynamic) width to that div. Is there any way that I can then capture and manipulate individual lines of text in the div programmaticaly (say, for example, capture and then wrap every line of text in its own span tag or something like this that will enable me to manipulate individual lines)?</p>
  
  <p>I have been able to accomplish this using a monospace font and basically first creating one span per line and just assigning the same number of characters per span (with a little extra code so words don't get cut off of course), but I would like to be able to do this with non-monospaced fonts, which will cause an issue of course because horizontal spacing of characters varies for non-monopsaced fonts.</p>
  
  <pre><code>var str = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.",
      container = $('&lt;div&gt;');
      container.width('100px').html(str).appendTo('body');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output of this is pretty much what you expect. It is <a href="http://coroproservices.pairserver.com/disintegrate/">live here</a>. What I seek to figure out:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Are newline characters that I can access automatically inserted when the line breaks?</p></li>
  <li><p>Are there any other mechanisms or properties in the DOM I can hack into to manipulate one line in a div?</p></li>
  <li><p>Is there another approach I haven't though of to be able to retain the appearance of natural flow of non-monospaced text while being able to access text line-by-line? As I said above, I have accomplished this with monospaced text, but my approach was dependent on the uniform horizontal spacing of monospaced text.</p></li>
  </ol>