Well what I did was remove the gutter between the respective spans then drawing a left border for the left span and a right border for the right span in such a way that their borders overlapped just to give a single line. This way the visible line will just be one of borders.
To fix the ugly look of a divider being too short when the content of one column is taller, add borders to all columns. Give every other column a negative margin to compensate for position differences.
Well here's another option which I've been using for some time now. It works great for me since I mostly need it do visually separate 2 cols. And it's also responsive. Which means that if I have columns next to each other in medium and large screen sizes, then I would use the class col-md-border, which would hide the separator on smaller screen sizes.
The cols must be inside an element where there are no other cols otherwise the selectors might not work as expected.
.col-md-border:not(:last-child) matches all but the last element before .row close and adds right border to it.
.col-md-border + .col-md-border matches the second div with the same class if these two are next to each other and adds left border and -1px negative margin. Negative margin is why it doesn't matter anymore which column has greater height and the separator will be 1px the same height as the highest column.
It does also have some problems...
When you try to be clever/lazy and use col-XX-X class together with hidden-XX/visible-XX classes inside the same row element.
When you have a lot of columns and need a pixel perfect thing. Since it moves n-1 column 1px to the left.
... But on the other hand it's responsive, works great for simple html and it's easy to create these classes for all bootstrap screen sizes.
Added media width clauses in the CSS so there isn't any nasty borders on the mobile-friendly side of things. Hope this helps! This will resize to the length of the longest column. Tested on .col-md-4 and .col-md-6 and my assumption is it is compatible with the rest. No guarantees though.
<link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<div class="container">
<h1>
.col-md-6
</h1>
<hr>
<div class="row text-center">
<div class="col-md-6 cols">
<p>Enter some text here</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6 cols">
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<h1>
.col-md-4
</h1>
<div class="row text-center">
<div class="col-md-4 cols">
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-4 cols">
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
</div>
<div class="cols col-md-4 cols">
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
<p>Enter some more text here</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
If you are still seeking for the best solution in 2018, I found the way this works perfectly if you have at least one free pseudo element( ::after or ::before ).
You just have to add class to your row like this: <div class="rowvertical-divider">
Note : .navbar-nav class is related to navbars and sets the css property list-style of all children elements to none which is required for the wrapping <li> element to display the vertical rule (separator) correctly.