css - vertical align middle in <div>

Question

I want to keep the height of #abc div at 50px and text to align vertically in the middle of the div.

body{
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  margin: 0px auto;
}

#main{
  position: relative;
  background-color:blue;
  width:500px;
  height:500px;
}

#abc{
  font:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
  font-size:18px;
  text-align:left;
  background-color:#0F0;
  height:50px;
  vertical-align:middle;
}

<div id="main">
 <div id="abc">
     asdfasdfafasdfasdf
 </div>
</div>

Answer 1

You can use line-height: 50px;, you won't need vertical-align: middle; there.

Demo

---

The above will fail if you've multiple lines, so in that case you can wrap your text using span and than use display: table-cell; and display: table; along with vertical-align: middle;, also don't forget to use width: 100%; for #abc

Demo

#abc{
  font:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
  font-size:18px;
  text-align:left;
  background-color:#0F0;
  height:50px;
  display: table;
  width: 100%;
}

#abc span {
  vertical-align:middle;
  display: table-cell;
}

---

Another solution I can think of here is to use transform property with translateY() where Y obviously stands for Y Axis. It's pretty straight forward... All you need to do is set the elements position to absolute and later position 50% from the top and translate from it's axis with negative -50%

div {
  height: 100px;
  width: 100px;
  background-color: tomato;
  position: relative;
}

p {
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  transform: translateY(-50%);
}

Demo

Note that this won't be supported on older browsers, for example IE8, but you can make IE9 and other older browser versions of Chrome and Firefox by using -ms, -moz and -webkit prefixes respectively.

For more information on transform, you can refer here.