In this paper, the truncated Painlev'e analysis and the consistent tanh expansion (CTE) method are developed for the (2+1)-dimensional breaking soliton equation. As a result, the soliton-cnoidal wave interaction solution of the equation is explicitly given, which is difficult to be found by other traditional methods. When the value of the Jacobi elliptic function modulus m = 1, the soliton-cnoidal wave interaction solution reduces back to the two-soliton solution. The method can also be extended to other types of nonlinear evolution equations in mathematical physics.