When you have a long line of text separated by hyphens, they will not normally be wrapped automatically onto the next line. This can be awkward, as it may break a perfectly good layout by breaking the content out of its containing box.
Some text like this for example, will not wrap if its container is quite narrow (say, in a table column).
466456-34635645-346346346-3463456
There is a solution - it’s the ’soft hyphen’:
­
Which will create a hyphen which will happily wrap onto the next line.